Everyday life would be easier if we could simply talk with machines instead of having to program them. Before such talking robots can be built, however, there must be a theory of how communicating with natural language works. This requires not only a grammatical analysis of the language signs, but also a model of the cognitive agent, with interfaces for recognition and action, an internal database, and an algorithm for reading content in and out. In Database Semantics, these ingredients are used for reconstructing natural language communication as a mechanism for transferring content from the database of the speaker to the database of the hearer.

Part I of this book presents a high-level description of an artificial agent which humans can freely communicate with in their accustomed language. Part II analyzes the major constructions of natural language, i.e., intra- and extrapropositional functor - argument structure, coordination, and coreference, in the speaker and the hearer mode. Part III defines declarative specifications for fragments of English, which are used for an implementation in Java.

The book provides researchers, graduate students and software engineers with a functional framework for the theoretical analysis of natural language communication and for all practical applications of natural language processing.

The first book on the Database Semantics theory, where natural communication is considered a transfer of content from the speaker's database into the hearer's database using natural language signs Includes supplementary material: sn.pub/extras

Inhalt
The Communication Mechanism of Cognition.- Matters of Method.- Interfaces and Components.- Data Structure and Algorithm.- Concept Types and Concept Tokens.- Forms of Thinking.- The Major Constructions of Natural Language.- Intrapropositional Functor-Argument Structure.- Extrapropositional Functor-Argument Structure.- Intrapropositional Coordination.- Extrapropositional Coordination.- Intrapropositional and Extrapropositional Coreference.- The Declarative Specification of Formal Fragments.- DBS.1: Hearer Mode.- DBS.1: Speaker Mode.- DBS.2: Hearer Mode.- DBS.2: Speaker Mode.- DBS.3: Adnominal and Adverbial Modifiers.