Integrating Compositional Semantics and Computational Modeling: A Semantic Analysis of the Arabic Lexeme الناس/Al-Nas (“People”)
TL;DR
This study employs linguistic analysis and logical reasoning to demonstrate the difference between the shallow and deep structures of individuals across verses and highlights how the meaning of a sentence can differ depending on the syntax and pragmatic context of the sentence.
Abstract
This research intersects with computational linguistics and compositional semantics. Briefly, it focuses on the compositional nature of meaning by studying the association between the Arabic lexeme for “people” and its occurrences in specific environments. The research creates a formal semantic model that describes the grammatical nature of meaning in Arabic and contributes to the variability and commonality in Arabic discourse. Through computational modeling, definitions derived from both dictionaries and corpora are scrutinized to identify the most common contexts of utilization and ambiguous patterns. This study employs linguistic analysis and logical reasoning to demonstrate the difference between the shallow and deep structures of individuals across verses; it also highlights how the meaning of a sentence can differ depending on the syntax and pragmatic context of the sentence. The results demonstrate the consistency of the combination of compositional semantics and NLP-based methods in the interpretation of religious texts. The results show the potential for computational semantics to function as a link between linguistic theory, logical reasoning, and linguistic understanding that would facilitate a greater degree of context sensitivity towards Arabic discourse.