摘要：In this essay I express some personal opinions regarding the influence that logic has on modern approaches to process natural language in artificial systems. I start by presenting some successful linguistic formalisms that were originated in logic, arguing why logic is important in conveying the meaning of language expression. Then, I counterbalance the argumentation with a number of examples where logic is impuissant to mirror language usage, finally supporting a rather temperate opinion about the usefulness of logic to formalise low level linguistic processes and about the limits of language formalisation.
关键词：natural language processing (NLP); logic theories in NLP; statistical approaches; symbolic versus statistical approaches in NLP.
