Knowledge Representation and the Semantics of Natural Language

Natural Language is not only the most important means of communication between human beings, it is also used over historical periods for the preservation of cultural achievements and their transmission from one generation to the other. During the last few decades, the flood of digitalized information has been growing tremendously. This tendency will continue with the globalization of information societies and with the growing importance of national and international computer networks. This is one reason why the theoretical understanding and the automated treatment of communication processes based on natural language have such a decisive social and economic impact. In this context, the semantic representation of knowledge originally formulated in natural language plays a central part, because it connects all components of natural language processing systems, be they the automatic understanding of natural language (analysis), the rational reasoning over knowledge bases, or the generation of natural language expressions from formal representations.