Abstract not found

Tree-adjoining grammars (TAG) have been proposed as a formalism for generation based on the intuition that the extended domain of syntactic locality that TAGs provide should aid in localizing semantic dependencies as well, in turn serving as an aid to generation from semantic representations. We demonstrate that this intuition can be made concrete by using the formalism of synchronous tree-adjoining grammars. The use of synchronous TAGs for generation provides solutions to several problems with previous approaches to TAG generation. Furthermore, the semantic monotonicity requirement previously advocated for generation gram- mars as a computational aid is seen to be an inherent property of synchronous TAGs.

Feature Structures and Path Congruences. The discussion of abstract feature structures raises a historical difficulty. While I do not dispute that the full theoretical investigation of feature structures modulo renaming is correctly attributed to Moshier, the idea of representing renaming classes by equivalence relations over paths seems an obvious variant of the representation of such classes as deductively closed sets of path equations in Pereira and Shieber's account (1984) of the semantics of PATR-II, which is further explored in Shieber's dissertation (1989).

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We investigate the consequences of adding unions and complements to attributive concept descriptions employed in terminological knowledge representation languages. It is shown that deciding coherence and subsumption of such descriptions are PSPACE-complete problems that can be decided with linear space.

We present a system for generating parsers based directly on the metaphor of parsing as deduction. Parsing algorithms can be represented directly as deduction systems, and a single deduction engine can interpret such deduction systems so as to implement the corresponding parser. The method generalizes easily to parsers for augmented phrase structure formalisms, such as definiteclause grammars and other logic grammar formalisms, and has been used for rapid prototyping of parsing algorithms for a variety of formalisms including variants of tree-adjoining grammars, categorial grammars, and lexicalized context-free grammars.

this paper, we have proposed novel methods for robust parsing that integrate the flexibility of linguistically motivated lexical descriptions with the robustness of statistical techniques. Our thesis is that the computation of linguistic structure can be localized if lexical items are associated with rich descriptions (Supertags) that impose complex constraints in a local context. The supertags are designed such that only those elements on which the lexical item imposes constraints appear within a given supertag. Further, each lexical item is associated with as many supertags as the number of different syntactic contexts in which the lexical item can appear. This makes the number of different descriptions for each lexical item much larger, than when the descriptions are less complex; thus increasing the local ambiguity for a parser. But this local ambiguity can be resolved by using statistical distributions of supertag co-occurrences collected from a corpus of parses. We have explored these ideas in the context of Lexicalized Tree-Adjoining Grammar (LTAG) framework. The supertags in LTAG combine both phrase structure information and dependency information in a single representation. Supertag disambiguation results in a representation that is effectively a parse (almost parse), and the parser needs `only' combine the individual supertags. This method of parsing can also be used to parse sentence fragments such as in spoken utterances where the disambiguated supertag sequence may not combine into a single structure. 1 Introduction In this paper, we present a robust parsing approach called supertagging that integrates the flexibility of linguistically motivated lexical descriptions with the robustness of statistical techniques. The idea underlying the approach is that the ...

We present a critical overview of the state-of-the-art in parser evaluation methodologies and metrics. A discussion of their relative strengths and weaknesses motivates a new---and we claim more informative and generally applicable---technique of measuring parser accuracy, based on the use of grammatical relations. We conclude with some preliminary results of experiments in which we use this new scheme to evaluate a robust parser of English.

This paper demonstrates that a systematic solution to the divergence problem can be derived from the forrealization of two types of information: (1) the linguistically grounded classes upon which lexical-semantic divergences are based; and (2) the techniques by which lexical-semantic divergences are resolved. This forrealization is advantageous in that it facilitates the design and implementation of the system, allows one to make an evaluation of the status of the system, and provides a basis for proving certain important properties about the system

The unification problem and several variants are presented. Various algorithms and data structures are discussed. Research on unification arising in several areas of computer science is surveyed, these areas include theorem proving, logic programming, and natural language processing. Sections of the paper include examples that highlight particular uses