Articles

We study parsing of tree adjoining gram- mars with particular emphasis on the use of shared forests to represent all the parse trees deriving a well-formed string. We show that there are two distinct ways of representing the parse forest one of which involves the use of linear indexed grammars …...

The paper presents a computational theory for resolving Japanese zero anaphora, based on the notion of discourse segment. We see that the discourse segment reduces the do- main of antecedents for zero anaphora and thus leads to their efficient resolution. Also we make crucial use of functional no- tions such …...

We show how techniques known from gen- erMized LR parsing can be applied to left- corner parsing. The ~esulting parsing algo- rithm for context-free grammars has some advantages over generalized LR parsing: the sizes and generation times of the parsers are smaller, the produced output is more compact, and the …...

Finite-State Morphology Ajit Narayanan & Lama Hashem Department of Computer Science University of Exeter Exeter EX4 4PT UK Abstract Aspects of abstract finite-state morphology are introduced and demonstrated. The use of two-way finite automata for Arabic noun stem and verb root inflection leads to ab- stractions based on finite-state transition …...

This paper solves some puzzles in the for- malisation of logic for discontinuity in cat- egorial grammar. A 'tuple' operation intro- duced in [Solias, 1992] is defined as a mode of prosodic combination which has associ- ated projection functions, and consequently can support a property of unique prosodic decomposability. Discontinuity …...

To respond to an utterance, a listener must interpret what others have said and why they have said it. Misunderstandings oc- cur when agents differ in their beliefs about what has been said or why. Our work com- bines intentional and social accounts of dis- course, unifying theories of speech …...

This paper offers a provisional mathemat- ical typology of metrical representations. First, a family of algebras corresponding to different versions of grid and bracketed grid theory is introduced. It is subsequently shown in what way bracketed grid theory differs from metrical theories using trees. Finally, we show that there are …...

This paper presents a method for parsing associative Lambek grammars based on graph- theoretic properties. Connection graphs, which are a simplified version of proof-nets, are actually a mere conservative extension of the earlier method of syntactic connexion, discovered by Ajduckiewicz [1935]. The method amounts to find alternating spanning trees in …...

We examine the role of temporal connec- tives in multi-sentence discourse. In cer- tain contexts, sentences containing tempo- ral connectives that are equivalent in tem- porai structure can fail to be equivalent in terms of discourse coherence. We account for this by offering a novel, formal mech- anism for accommodating …...

In GB, the importance of phrase-structure rules has dwindled in favour of nearness conditions. Today, nearness conditions play a major role in defining the correct linguis- tic representations. They are expressed in terms of special binary relations on trees called command relations. Yet, while the formal theory of phrase-structure gram- …...

We offer a semantics and pragmatics of the pluperfect in narrative discourse. We rex- amine in a formal model of implicature, how the reader's knowledge about the dis- course, Gricean-maxims and causation con- tribute to the meaning of the pluperfect. By placing the analysis in a theory where the interactions …...

This paper proposes a method for measur- ing semantic similarity between words as a new tool for text analysis. The simi- larity is measured on a semantic network constructed systematically from a subset of the English dictionary, LDOCE (Long- man Dictionary of Contemporary English). Spreading activation on the network can …...

A semi-automatic procedure of linguistic knowledge acquisition is proposed, which combines corpus-based techniques with the conventional rule-based approach. The rule-based component generates all the pos- sible hypotheses of defects which the ex- isting linguistic knowledge might contain, when it fails to parse a sentence. The rule-based component does not try …...

The paper shows how the verbal lexicon can be formalised in a way that captures and exploits generalisations about the alterna- tion behaviour of verb classes. An alter- nation is a pattern in which a number of words share the same relationship between • a pair of senses. The alternations …...

We give an analysis of ellipsis resolution in terms of a straightforward discourse copying algorithm that correctly predicts a wide range of phenomena. The treat- ment does not suffer from problems inher- ent in identity-of-relations analyses. Fur- thermore, in contrast to the approach of Dalrymple et al. [1991], the treatment …...

Kaplan et al. (1989) present a framework for translation based on the description and correspondence concepts of Lexical- Functional Grammar (Kaplan and Bresnan, 1982). Certain phenomena, in particular the head-switching of adverbs and verbs, seem to be problematic for that approach. In this paper we suggest that these difficulties are …...

One of the major problems one is faced with when decomposing words into their constituent parts is ambiguity: the gen- eration of multiple analyses for one input word, many of which are implausible. In order to deal with ambiguity, the MOR- phological PArser MORPA is provided with a probabilistic context-free …...

The interpretation of coercion construc- tions (to begin a book) has been recently considered as resulting from the operation of type changing. For instance, a phrase of type o (object) is coerced to a phrase of type e (event) under the influence of the predi- cate. We show that this …...

The lexicons for Knowledge-Based Machine Translation systems require knowledge in- tensive morphological, syntactic and se- mantic information. This information is of- ten used in different ways and usually for- matted for a specific NLP system. This tends to make both the acquisition and maintenance of lexical databases cumber- some, inefficient …...

An assumption shared by many theories of discourse is that discourse structure con- strains anaphora resolution (cf. [Grosz and Sidner 1986] for definite NPs, [Lascarides and Asher 1991], [Nakhimovsky 1988] for temporal anaphora, [Webber 1990] for deictic pronouns and [Gardent 1991], [Prfist and Scha 1990] for VP ellipsis). The aim …...