An Implemented Formalism for Computing Linguistic Presuppositions and Existential Commitments
arXiv:cmp-lg/9504018
Abstract
We rely on the strength of linguistic and philosophical perspectives in constructing a framework that offers a unified explanation for presuppositions and existential commitment. We use a rich ontology and a set of methodological principles that embed the essence of Meinong's philosophy and Grice's conversational principles into a stratified logic, under an unrestricted interpretation of the quantifiers. The result is a logical formalism that yields a tractable computational method that uniformly calculates all the presuppositions of a given utterance, including the existential ones.
10 pages, LaTeX Source. Requires iwcs.sty file. Ignore LaTeX warning messages (Proceedings of the International Workshop on Computational Semantics, Tilburg, The Netherlands, pages 141--150, December 1994.)