A Diagrammatic Calculus for a Functional Model of Natural Language Semantics

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2507.00782v2
• Date: Wed, 23 Jul 2025 12:07:49 GMT
• Title: A Diagrammatic Calculus for a Functional Model of Natural Language Semantics
• Authors: Matthieu Pierre Boyer,
• Abstract summary: We will formalize a category based type and effect system to represent the semantic difference between syntactically equivalent expressions.<n>We then construct a diagrammatic calculus to model parsing and handling of effects, providing a method to efficiently compute the denotations for sentences.
• Score: 0.0
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: In this paper, we study a functional programming approach to natural language semantics, allowing us to increase the expressiveness of a more traditional denotation style. We will formalize a category based type and effect system to represent the semantic difference between syntactically equivalent expressions. We then construct a diagrammatic calculus to model parsing and handling of effects, providing a method to efficiently compute the denotations for sentences.

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