Formal Semantics and Pragmatics for Natural Language Querying

This discussion of the connection between two areas of semantics, namely the semantics of databases and the semantics of natural language, links them via a common view of the semantics of time. It is argued that a coherent theory of the semantics of time is an essential ingredient for the success of efforts to incorporate more "real world" semantics into database models. This idea is a relatively recent concern of database research but it is receiving growing interest. The book opens with a discussion of database querying that motivates the use of the paradigm of Montague Semantics and discusses the details of the intensional logic ILs. This is followed by a description of the author's own model, the Historical Relational Data Model (HRDM), which extends the RDM to include a temporal dimension. Finally the database querying language QEIII is defined and examples illustrate its use. A formal model for the interpretation of questions is presented in this work; it will form the basis for much further research. This text will be valuable for graduate students and researchers in theoretical computer science.