SEMANTICA

Semantica is a software application tool designed to let you study natural language semantics in a fun, interactive way. The program provides a simple graphical interface for:

• Creating a semantic theory (consisting of lexical and phrasal semantic rules)
• Deriving truth-conditions from that theory for natural language phrase-markers
• Testing those truth-conditions against a pictorially represented universe of worlds and times.

Semantica permits many aspects of semantic theory to be explored, including a wide variety of construction types such as predicates, proper nouns, demonstratives, quantifiers, tenses, and modal adverbs. Semantic theories can be built up step by step by students, with full control of their interpretive possibilities.

Originally developed under NeXTSTEP, Semantica has recently been ported to JAVA. Semantica for JAVA is currently in beta-release and runs under a variety of operating systems, including WIN 95 (98, etc.) and LINUX.

Semantica was authored by Richard Larson, David S. Warren, Juliana Freire de Lima e Silva, Patricia Gomez and Kostis Sagonas. The development of Semantica was supported in part by the National Science Foundation grant USE-9150417.

Available at this point:

A fuller description of Semantica (external PDF file)

Semantica (NeXTSTEP Version) is available from MIT Press

Semantica for JAVA will be available from MIT Press soon!

A screenshot showing config & trees windows and a derivation of truth-conditions.

A screenshot showing a universe & world window.

Contact Information:

This project was supported in part by the National Science Foundation