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What techniques exist for parsing sentences based on logical connectives and quantifiers? That is, for parsing sentences that are structured "around" logical connectives and quantifiers.

E.g.

[A] fish is [any] [member of] a paraphyletic [group of] organism[s] that [consist of] [all] gill- bearing aquatic craniate animal[s] that lack limb[s] [with] digit[s].

Here brackets [ ] are used to denote the semantics (quantifiers and connectives) that I'm interested in being able to parse.

Can e.g. the context-free grammar express all sorts of connectives and quantifiers?

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    $\begingroup$ Please be more specific. Parsing is usually something you apply to whole sentences in order to obtain an analysis of their structure. Is that what you want, or do you merely want to recognize the occurrences of certain kinds of terms within sentences? $\endgroup$ – reinierpost Dec 17 '15 at 8:38
  • $\begingroup$ @reubueroist I'm parsing whole sentences, but specifically I need to be able to pick out logical connectives and quantifiers since I'll be using them to reason about what they're connected to. Is the parsing of such sentences doable with a "standard" CFG? $\endgroup$ – mavavilj Dec 17 '15 at 8:52
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    $\begingroup$ It's only doable with a CFG for an artificially restricted sublanguage. A whole field is devoted to parsing natural language. $\endgroup$ – reinierpost Dec 17 '15 at 10:07
  • $\begingroup$ @reinierpost Yeah NLP looks like it should have what I'm seeking. I'd like to find a list of connectives and quantifiers and some pointers on how to parse using them. $\endgroup$ – mavavilj Dec 18 '15 at 13:15

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