New Book: SEMANTICS FOR DESCRIPTIONS

[Christine Sosa]

CSLI Publications is pleased to announce the publication of:

SEMANTICS FOR DESCRIPTIONS: FROM LINGUISTICS TO COMPUTER SCIENCE,
Francois Rastier (National Center of Scientific Research, Marc
Cavazza (University of Teesside), and Anne Abeille (University of
Paris VII), eds.;  paper ISBN: 1-57586-352-9, $25.00, cloth ISBN:
1-57586-353-7, $65.00, 288 pages. CSLI Publications 2002.
http://cslipublications.stanford.edu , email: pubs at csli.stanford.edu.

To order this book, contact The University of Chicago Press. Call
their toll free order number 1-800-621-2736  (U.S. & Canada only)  or
order online at http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ (use the search
feature to locate the book, then order).

Book description:

In this multimedia age, text description raises the question of how
different perceptual modalities and different semiotic systems
actually interact. The semiotic paradigm could soon replace the
computational paradigm, especially as a means of modeling text
understanding. The field of automatic language processing has
encountered a number of difficulties because the semantic theories it
relies on do not take into account recent advances in linguistic
semantics. In particular, a text cannot be reduced to a string of
characters or to a series of instructions. Texts, which can even
encompass expert interviews and technical documents, are in fact
cultural objects. Interpreting them consequently requires a detailed
description of textual genres, communicative conditions, and the
language used. Where a positivist approach has proven unsuccessful, a
rational hermeneutics can offer more suitable descriptive methods
because it allows the theoretical and practical conditions of text
interpretation to be defined. It provides a methodological framework
capable of adapting corpus descriptions to the objectives of
applications. Drawing on the most recent studies, this
interdisciplinary work addresses itself as much to linguists as to
computer scientists. Its didactic format, along with the concrete
analyses it contains, also makes it accessible to students.

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