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arXiv · 2507.00782

A Diagrammatic Calculus for a Functional Model of Natural Language Semantics

Matthieu Pierre Boyer
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Abstract

In this paper, we study a functional programming approach to natural language semantics, allowing us to increase the expressiveness of a more traditional denotation style. We will formalize a category based type and effect system to represent the semantic difference between syntactically equivalent expressions. We then construct a diagrammatic calculus to model parsing and handling of effects, providing a method to efficiently compute the denotations for sentences.

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Matthieu Pierre Boyer. 2025-07-01. A Diagrammatic Calculus for a Functional Model of Natural Language Semantics. https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.00782

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