The view of computational semantics that informs and drives this book is one that sees the computation of linguistic meaning as that of computing logically transparent representations of meaning from “raw linguistic data”, linguistic input as it reaches a recipient when he hears something or reads it, and to which he has to attach a sense. The book abstracts away from the differences between hearing and reading in that it assumes that the “raw data” have already been preprocessed as strings of words. Such computations of meaning are generally assumed to involve the computation of structure at several levels, minimally at a level of syntactic form and then, via the syntactic structure obtained at that level, of the semantic representation. This implies that in order to do computational semantics properly you need proficiency in at least three things: (i) proficiency in computation (you need to be proficient in the use of at least one suitable programming language), (ii) proficiency in syntax, and (iii) proficiency in semantics, in the more narrow sense in which semantics is understood by many linguists, but also in a broader sense.

The message this book drives home is that computing semantic representations from “raw data” isn't all there is to computational semantics. Computing semantic representations wouldn't be of much use to us if, once we have constructed them, there wouldn't be anything we could do with them.