Syntax-driven analysis of context-free languages with respect to fuzzy relational semantics

A grammatical framework is presented that aug ments context free production rules with semantic production rules that rely on fuzzy relations as representations of fuzzy natural language concepts. It is shown how the well known tech nique of syntax driven semantic analysis can be used to infer from an expression in a language defined in such a semantically augmented grammar a weak ordering on the possible worlds it describes. Considering the application of natural language query processing, we show how to order elements in the domain of a relational database scheme according to the degree to which they fulfill the intuition behind a given natural language statement like "Carol lives in a small city near San Francisco".