Abstract not found

Abstract not found

This paper has had a long gestation. Initial arguments for a lexicalist treatment of Japanese causatives were gathered in a seminar class run by Ivan Sag in 1990. Participants included Makoto Kanazawa, Patrick O'Neill, and Whitney Tabor. The details of the analysis were changed and a new paper written by the listed authors and O'Neill for presentation at the 1994 LSA Annual Meeting in Boston. The present version, which includes new data and extensive analytic revisions, was prepared by Manning and Sag, in regular consultation with Iida. We thank earlier contributors, and in addition are grateful to the following for comments and discussion: Emily Bender, Gosse Bouma, Ann Copestake, Kaz Fukushima, Takao Gunji, Rob Malouf, Tsuneko Nakazawa, Jerry Sadock, and Peter Sells. We're not quite sure who should be held responsible for any remaining errors. b. The construal phenomena that seem to motivate an analysis of Japanese causatives in terms of embedded constituent structures can be explained in terms of hierarchical lexical argument structures. c. It is possible to maintain a strictly lexical analysis, once a suitable conception of lexical structure and organization is adopted. Our analysis, which provides a simple alternative to current proposals making extensive use of verb-embedding, functional projections and empty categories, is cast within the framework of Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG), but is easily adapted to other lexical frameworks, such as LFG and Categorial Grammar, and is similar in some respects to lexical GB accounts like those offered by Miyagawa (1980) and Kitagawa (1986). 2 The Data

The paper presents a constraint based semantic formalism for HPSG. The syntax-semantics interface directly implements syntactic conditions on quantifier scoping and distributivity. The con- struction of semantic representations is guided' by general principles governing the interaction between syntax and semantics. Each of these princip- les acts as a constraint to narrow down the set of possible interpretations of a sentence. Meanings of ambiguous sentences are represented by single partial representations (so-called U(nderspecified) D(iscourse) R(epresentation) S(tructure)s) to which further constraints can be added monotonically to gain more information about the content of a sent- ence. There is no need to build up a large number of alternative representations of the sentence which are then filtered by subsequent discourse and world knowledge. The advantage of UDRSs is not only that they allow for monotonic incremental interpretation but also that they are equipped with truth conditions and a proof theory that allows for inferences to be drawn directly on structures where quantifier scope is not resolved.

I explore some of the issues that arise when trying to establish a connection between the underspecification hypothesis pursued in the NLP literature and work on ambiguity in semantics and in the psychological literature. A theory of underspecification is developed `from the first principles', i.e., starting from a definition of what it means for a sentence to be semantically ambiguous and from what we know about the way humans deal with ambiguity. An underspecified language is specified as the translation language of a grammar covering sentences that display three classes of semantic ambiguity: lexical ambiguity, scopal ambiguity, and referential ambiguity. The expressions of this language denote sets of senses. A formalization of defeasible reasoning with underspecified representations is presented, based on Default Logic. Some issues to be confronted by such a formalization are discussed. 1 The Combinatorial Explosion Puzzle The alternative syntactic readings of a sen...

We present a system for the incremental interpretation of natural-language utterances in context. The main goal of the work is to account for the influences of context on interpretation, while preserving compositionality to the extent possible. To achieve this goal, we introduce a representational device, conditional interpretations, and a rule system for constructing them. Conditional interpretations represent the potential contributions of phrases to the interpretation of an utterance. The rules specify how phrase interpretations are combined and how they are elaborated with respect to context. The control structure defined by the rules determines the points in the interpretation process at which sufficient information becomes available to carry out specific inferential interpretation steps, such as determining the plausibility of particular referential connections or modifier attachments. We have implemented these ideas in Candide, a system for interactive acquisition of procedural ...

this paper was done during the summer of 1995, when the alphabetically second author visited the first as a guest academic researcher in the Mathematics Department of the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY. During this period, Stuart Shieber spent several days with us at IBM discussing several of the complexity issues we address in this paper. We are grateful to him for his help in clarifying these issues, although he bears no responsibility for any of the claims we make. Some of the material in this paper was presented in joint talks at the Linguistics Colloquium of University College, University of London, March 1996, the Third International Conference on HPSG, Marseille, May 1996, and the Twelfth Annual Conference of the Israel Association for Theoretical Linguistics, Hebrew University, Jerusalem, June 1996, and in a seminar on formal syntax which the second author taught in the Linguistics Department, Universite de Paris 7 during May 1996. We are grateful to the participants in these events for helpful discussion. We would also like to thank Elabbas Benmamoun, Robert Borsley, Michael Brody, Chris Collins, Daniele Goddard, Norbert Hornstein, Hans van de Koot, Wilfried Meyer-Viol, Larry Moss, Fritz Newmeyer, Frank Oles, Carl Pollard, Paul Postal, Bill Rounds, Ivan Sag, Andrew Simpson, Eun Jung Yoo, and two anonymous reviewers for useful comments and criticism on earlier drafts of the paper. Needless to say, we alone are responsible for the arguments presented here and any of their shortcomings.

This paper concerns treatment of variables in a dynamic semantics. The main empirical concern will be the interaction of presupposition and quantification, but I will also consider how epistemic modals and quantifiers combine. I will show how these empirical considerations motivate a choice between two styles of quantification. The first of these styles involves treating quantified variables rather like discourse markers, whereas the second style gives variables a more classical interpretation. I will argue for the second, more conservative option

We report on a mechanism for semantic and prag-matic interpretation that has been designed to take advantage of the generally compositional na-ture of semantic analysis, without unduly con-straining the order in which pragmatic decisions are made. To achieve this goal, we introduce the idea of a conditional interpretation: one that de-pends upon a set of assumptions about subsequent pragmatic processing. Conditional interpretations are constructed compositionally according to a set of declaratively specified interpretation rules. The mechanism can handle a wide range of pragmatic phenomena and their interactions. 1

This paper presents intial work on a system that bridges from robust, broad-coverage natural language processing to precise semantics and automated reasoning, focusing on solving logic puzzles drawn from sources such as the Law School Admission Test (LSAT) and the analytic section of the Graduate Record Exam (GRE). We highlight key challenges, and discuss the representations and performance of the prototype system.