Contents Introduction xix Chapter 1. The Sphere of Lexicons and Knowledge 1 1.1. Lexical semantics 1 1.2. Lexical databases 23 1.3. Knowledge representation and ontologies 49 Chapter 2. The Sphere of Semantics 75 2.1. Combinatorial semantics 75 2.2. Formal semantics 95 Chapter 3. The Sphere of Discourse and Text 123 3.1. Discourse analysis and pragmatics 123 3.2. Computational approaches to discourse 146 Chapter 4. The Sphere of Applications 169 4.1. Software engineering for NLP software 169 4.2. Machine translation (MT) 191 4.3. Information retrieval (IR) 211 4.4. Big Data (BD) and information extraction 234 Conclusion 259 Bibliography 263 Index 301