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mm_ OP wrote

Reply to comment by anand in "An interactive online textbook on propositional logic, from mathematician Terry Tao. Learn by proving things!" by mm_

oh thats neat. i took a compilers class way long ago and learning just a bit of that stuff, or maybe adjacent concepts to NLS, was really incredible

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anand wrote (edited )

it is closely related! one might say the goal of natural language semantics is coming up with a systematic way to translate any sentence into a sentence of first-order logic (or some more complicated system)

the main problem is that while we understand what what we want a program to do, it's hard to give good meanings to sentences. worthy of a field!

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mm_ OP wrote

ooh thats so cool, yea i was mistaken about what your talking about, now i realize its more like philosophy right? like the early analytics started? i have some pages bookmarked on montague semantics somewhere

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anand wrote

yeah, montague semantics is one approach that heavily influenced the field (it essentially invented the syntax-semantics interface, where you give meanings to sentences by giving meanings to words and composing them through the syntax)!

the field as a whole is on the border between philosophy and linguistics, which is really dope. it has to draw from philosophy to get satisfactory explanations of meaning in the first place, but also from linguistics so it can use syntax.

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