A CCG-based compositional semantics and inference system for comparatives

Comparative constructions play an important role in natural language inference. However, attempts to study semantic representations and logical inferences for comparatives from the computational perspective are not well devel- oped, due to the complexity of their syntactic structures and inference patterns. In this study, using a framework based on Combinatory Cat- egorial Grammar (CCG), we present a compo- sitional semantics that maps various compara- tive constructions in English to semantic rep- resentations, and introduce an inference sys- tem that effectively handles logical inference with comparatives, including those involving numeral adjectives, antonyms, and quantifica- tion. We evaluate the performance of our sys- tem on the FraCaS test suite and show that the system can handle a variety of complex logical inferences with comparatives.