Semantic Underspecification

Abstract

Abstract Semantic underspecification is a technique to capture several readings of an ambiguous expression in one single representation by deliberately omitting the differences between the readings in the representation. First, underspecification formalisms will be presented to introduce underspecification in general and to outline important properties of these formalisms that allow their classification into subgroups. After expounding the kinds of ambiguity to which underspecification can be applied, the article then presents various motivations for the use of underspecification, and shows how underspecified semantic representations can be further processed.