Cognitive Modeling for Formal Semantics: The Organization of DRSs in Declarative Memory

Abstract

One of the key and still outstanding challenges for formal semantics is “how to build for mal semantics into real-time processing models– whether psychological or computational– that involve the integration of linguistic and not-specifically linguistic knowledge.” [11] In this paper, we outline the structure of a cognitively realistic semantic processor that we have fully implemented elsewhere [5]. The processor is able to incrementally construct DRT semantic representations in response to linguistic stimuli. We show how this seman tic parser can be used to account for the reaction time (RT) data in the fan experiment reported in [4], which investigates how propositional information of the kind encoded by atomic DRSs is (stored and) retrieved from declarative memory. We provide the first (to our knowledge) fully implemented and cognitively realistic model of incremental interpre tation and semantic evaluation that is systematically informed by formal semantics and can be used to model RT data.