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SEMANTICA

Semantica is a software application tool designed to let you study natural language semantics in a fun, interactive way. The program provides a simple graphical interface for:

  • Creating a semantic theory (consisting of lexical and phrasal semantic rules)
  • Deriving truth-conditions from that theory for natural language phrase-markers
  • Testing those truth-conditions against a pictorially represented universe of worlds and times.

Semantica permits many aspects of semantic theory to be explored, including a wide variety of construction types such as predicates, proper nouns, demonstratives, quantifiers, tenses, and modal adverbs. Semantic theories can be built up step by step by students, with full control of their interpretive possibilities.

Originally developed under NeXTSTEP, Semantica has been ported to JAVA, where it runs under Mac OSX, WIN XP/Vista and Linux.

Semantica was authored by Richard Larson, David S. Warren, Juliana Freire de Lima e Silva, Patricia Gomez and Kostis Sagonas, and was ported to JAVA by S.V. Ramanan. The development of Semantica was supported in part by the National Science Foundation grant USE-9150417.