Discourse representation theory
framework for exploring meaning
In formal linguistics, discourse representation theory (DRT) is a framework for exploring meaning under a formal semantics approach. One of the main differences between DRT-style approaches and traditional Montagovian approaches is that DRT includes a level of abstract mental representations (discourse representation structures, DRS) within its formalism, which gives it an intrinsic ability to handle meaning across sentence boundaries. DRT was created by Hans Kamp in 1981. A very similar theory was developed independently by Irene Heim in 1982, under the name of File Change Semantics (FCS). Discourse representation theories have been used to implement semantic parsers and natural language understanding systems.
Discourse representation structures
DRT uses discourse representation structures (DRS) to represent a hearer's mental representation of a discourse as it unfolds over time. There are two critical components to a DRS:
A set of discourse referents representing entities that are under discussion.
A set of DRS conditions representing information that has been given about discourse referents.
Consider Sentence (1) below:
(1) A farmer owns a donkey.
The DRS of (1) can be notated as (2) below:
(2) [x,y: farmer(x), donkey(y), owns(x,y)]
What (2) says is that there are two discourse referents, x and y, and three discourse conditions farmer, donkey, and owns, such that the condition farmer holds of x, donkey holds of y, and owns holds of the pair x and y.
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This entry incorporates text from “Discourse representation theory” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.