This section has covered syntax, where different methods of representing grammars where discussed, FSUGs being the most compact and abstract, compared to DCGs and CFGs.
The parsing summary dealt with top down, bottom up, left corner and chart parsing, explaining the increase in power each class of parsers has over the previous one.
The semantics discussion gave a description of the requirements a meaning representation should meet, and then outlined how first order predicate calculus went a long way to fulfilling them before moving onto pragmatics, where discourse agents were discussed and the inference method known as logical abduction was defined.
Three available technologies for NLP were given, along with their capabilities, advantages and disadvantages. Prolog allows simple, effective logic programs to be written, whilst Mercury programs offer much of the same power but with come of the constraints of an imperative programming language. Spirit was briefly overviewed as an alternative to the logic paradigm, and as such it lacked much of the power they have to offer, which can be seen by the ability to only implement a recursive descent parser.