Thus it seems essential to find a uniform framework for jointly resolving all forms of ambiguity and underspecification, at least to the extent that their resolution impacts inference. Some frameworks that have been proposed are weighted abduction, constraint solving, and  “loose-speak” interpretation. Weighted abduction (Hobbs et al. 1993) is based on the idea that the task of the hearer or reader is to explain the word sequence comprising a sentence by viewing the meaning of  that sentence as a logical consequence of general and contextual knowledge along with some assumptions, to be kept as “lightweight” as possible. The constraint-solving approach views syntax, semantics, pragmatics, context, and world knowledge as supplying constraints on interpretations that need to be satisfied simultaneously.  Often constraints are treated as defeasible, or ranked, in which case the goal is to minimize constraint violations, particularly of relatively strong constraints.  (There is a connection here to Optimality Theory in cognitive language modeling.) Loose-speak interpretation (Fan et al. 2009, cited previously in connection with nominal compound interpretation) sets aside syntactic ambiguity but tries to deal with pervasive semantic looseness in the meanings of nominal compounds, metonymy, and other linguistic devices. It does so by expanding semantic triples (from the preliminary logical form) of type ⟨Class1, relation, Class2⟩, where the relation cannot properly relate the specified classes, into longer chains containing that relation and terminating at those classes. Finding such chains depends on background knowledge about the relations that are possible in the domain of interest.