A Simple Syntax for Complex Semantics

A Simple Syntax for Complex Semantics Kiyong Lee Department of Linguistics, Korea University Seoul, 136-701 Korea klee@korea.ac.kr Abstract As part of a long-ranged project that aims at establishing database- theoretic semantics as a model of computational semantics, this presentation focuses on the development of a syntactic component for processeing strings of words or sentences to construct semantic data structures. For design and modeling purposes, the present treatment will be restricted to the analysis of some problematic constructions of Korean involving semi-free word order, conjunction and temporal anchoring, and adnominal modification and antecedent binding. The present work heavily relies on Hausser's (1999, 2000) SLIM theory for language that is based on surface compositionality, time- linearity and two other conditions on natural language processing. Time-linear syntax for natural language has been shown to be concep- tually simple and computationally efficient. The associated semantics is complex, however, because it must deal with situated language involving interactive multi-agents. . Nevertheless, by processing input word strings in a time-linear mode, the syntax can incrementally construct the necessary semantic structures for relevant queries and valid inferences. The fragment of Korean syntax will be implemented in Malaga, a C- type implementation language that was enriched for both programming and debugging purposes and that was particluarly made suitable for implementing in Left-Associative Grammar. This presentation will show how the system of syntactic rules with constraining subrules processes Korean sentences in a step-by-step time-linear manner to incrementally construct semantic data structures that mainly specify relations with their argument, temporal, and binding structures. 2 1 Introduction The main purpose of this work is to lay a syntactic basis for computational semantics. Despite the complexity of computational semantics, it is assumed that its underlying syntax must be simple. A simple syntax is advocated for complex semantics. The task of computational semantics cannot be but complex because its ultimate aim is to model how human-machine communications are carried out by means of natural language. That of syntax can, however, be made simple at both the structural and the procedural level. The proposed syn- tactic module KoSyn, for instance, is implemented to be structurally simple, only consisting of a set of concatenation rules with some constraining sub- rules like valency check or parameter binding. It is also made procedurally simple because it processes linguistic input in a time-linear manner and builds up semantic data structures incrementally. For this reason, the present talk will aim at showing how to minimalize the task of syntax by constructing the Korean syntactic module called KoSyn for testing and demonstration purposes. It is designed to generate a network of semantic data structures without deriving intermediate syntactic trees and also to represent them in a format that database-theoretic semantics can recognize and manipulate for the purpose of interpretation, production, and inference. This presentation will, however, be restricted to the discussion of representational issues for semantics. By analyzing a fragment of Korean, this presentation will show in detail how KoSyn generates semantic structures for simple and conjoined sentences and also …

Content truncated to 500 words