Implementing Cognitive Semantics

Abstract: This book is about how concepts are structured and processed. It is based on the findings in cognitive linguistics over the last decade, where thorough studies have been made about how concepts function. Concepts appear as image schemata, a spatial form of representation with very powerful properties. It embodies prototypicality, boundedness, orientation, plexity, scale proportions, part-whole relations, domains, paths and much more. In Part 1 of the book, the author lays the foundations for an implementation of image-schematic structures. Building valence relations between image schemata means superimposing them. The superimposition process turns, scales, tilts, adjusts and accommodates image schemata so as to conjoin them. Disambiguation, metaphor, metonymy, context-sensitivity and "Garden-Path" behaviour are only some of the many natural parts of this process. Anomalies are detected and many methods are outlined to resolve them. Part 2 of this book describes how the superimposition process could be implemented. Any Ai model of of planning, reasoning or natural language processing needs a mechanism for suggesting valence relations between concepts. With image schemata, these suggestions can be made by semantic and grammatical expectations. Together, these two types of expectations handle both semantic requirements and grammatical clause structure, Part 3 of the book is about implementing the suggestion of valence relations and the administration of composite concepts, occurring in parallell with superimposition, all within a linear time complexity.