Underspecified Beta Reduction

Manuel Bodirsky, Katrin Erk, Alexander Koller, Joachim Niehren

Abstract: For ambiguous sentences, traditional semantics construction produces large numbers of higher-order formulas, which must then be β-reduced individually. Underspecified versions can produce compact descriptions of all readings, but it is not known how to perform β-reduction on these descriptions. We show how to do this using β-reduction constraints in the constraint language for λ-structures (CLLS).