• Summary
• Related Documents
  • Active Bibliography
  • Co-citation
• Version History

Abstract:

Sentence processing is almost always an effortless task. This seemingly banal observation about human linguistic ability becomes considerably more puzzling when juxtaposed with the somewhat less obvious observation that human language exhibits rampant (local) ambiguity. That is to say, in the processing of a given sentence there are likely to be many points at which there are multiple analyses compatible with the input seen thus far, but only one of which will turn out to be consistent with the remainder of the utterance. Many traditional models of parsing deal with such ambiguity by exploiting some type of parallelism, carrying a number of partial parses forward from the point of ambiguity for further consideration. Such a proliferation of parses is bound to consume significant time and space resources. Yet, the presence of ambiguity does not in general give rise to difficulties for human processing. This suggests that these traditional models do not capture the mechanism which humans exploit in building structural representations of the sentences they hear. An alternative approach to the local ambiguity problem is suggested by Marcus, Hindle, and Fleck (1983) in their work on D-theory. In this work, they abandon the idea of constructing multiple parse trees in parallel in favor of building a

Citations