---
title: "Negation And Focus in Man - Machine Communication"
authors:
  - "Petr Sgall"
  - "Eva Hajicová"
doi: ""
url: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1975/70"
pdf: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1975/0070.pdf"
venue: "Proceedings of the Fourth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence"
year: 1975
pages: "443-447"
track: "Natural Language Understanding"
keywords:
---

# Negation And Focus in Man - Machine Communication

Petr Sgall, Eva Hajicová

*Proceedings of the Fourth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence*, pages 443-447.

## Abstract

A sketch of a programme for man-machine communication as being prepared by Prague linguists is presented, with a characterization of the scope of negation and of the nature of focus - two problema that appeared crucial with respect to the following issues1 (i) grammatical analysis of input texts, yielding unambiguous semantic representations (SR's) of subsequent sentences, (ii) algoritbme translating the SR's into a logical language in the form of which the information gained from the natural language input is to be stored in the computer memory, (iii) form of the SR's, i.e. the language serving, among other purposes, as the output of (i) and input of (ii). It is shown especially that the logical impact of natural language negation can be accounted for only if the topic/focus dichoto~ is duly analyzed.