Information-oriented computation with BABY-SIT

Abstract

While situation theory and situation semantics provide an appropriate framework for a realistic model-theoretic treatment of natural language, serious thinking on their `computational' aspects has only recently started. Existing proposals mainly offer a Prolog- or Lisp-like programming environment with varying degrees of divergence from the ontology of situation theory. In this paper, we introduce a computational medium (called BABY-SIT) based on situations. The primary motivation underlying BABY-SIT is to facilitate the development and testing of programs in domains ranging from linguistics to artificial intelligence in a unified framework built upon situation-theoretic constructs.