Linguistic Issues in Language Technology (LiLT) is an open-access journal that focuses on the relationships between linguistic insights and language technology. In conjunction with machine learning and statistical techniques, deeper and more sophisticated models of language and speech are needed to make significant progress in both existing and newly emerging areas of computational language analysis. The vast quantity of electronically accessible natural language data (text and speech, annotated and unannotated, formal and informal) provides unprecedented opportunities for data-intensive analysis of linguistic phenomena, which can in turn enrich computational methods. Taking an eclectic view on methodology, LiLT provides a forum for this work. In this volume, contributors offer new perspectives on semantic representations for textual inference.

Lauri Karttunen has done groundbreaking work in theoretical and computational linguistics. The papers in this volume present new, state-of-the-art work building on his numerous contributions. The first part includes papers on formal semantics, the focus of Karttunen's early career to which he has returned in recent years. The second part provides a natural extension of his semantic work: the formal analysis of meaning and reasoning and the integration of the lexical and ontological components to enable reasoning by computational systems. The third part focuses on syntactic analyses, including the structure of non-finite clauses and sentence embedding predicates and factivity. The final part of the volume deals with finite state methods and grammars, reflecting Karttunen's extensive contributions to finite state theory and technology and its application to natural language.