Articles

This paper presents an implemented, psychologically plau- sible parsing model for Government Binding theory gram- mars. I make use of two main ideas: (1) a generaliza- tion of the licensing relations of [Abney, 1986] allows for the direct encoding of certain principles of grammar (e.g. Theta Criterion, Case Filter) which …...

Incorporation of defaults in grammar formalisms is important for reasons of linguistic adequacy and grammar organization. In this paper we present an algorithm for handling default information in unification grammar. The algorithm specifies a logical operation on feature structures, merging with the non-default structure only those parts of the default …...

The principle known as 'free indexation' plays an important role in the determination of the refer- ential properties of noun phrases in the principle- and-parameters language framework. First, by in- vestigating the combinatorics of free indexation, we show that the problem of enumerating all possi- ble indexings requires exponential time. …...

Referring expressions and other object descriptions should be maximal under the Local Brevity, No Unnecessary Components, and Lexical Preference preference rules; otherwise, they may lead hearers to infer unwanted conversational implicatures. These preference rules can be incorporated into a polyno- mial time generation algorithm, while some alterna- tive formalizations of …...

In the right situation, a speaker can use an unqual- ified indefinite description without being misun- derstood. This use of language, normal slate im- plicature, is a kind of conversational implicature, i.e. a non-truth-functional context-dependent in- ference based upon language users' awareness of principles of cooperative conversation. I present a …...

Conversation between two people is usually of MIXED-INITIATIVE, with CONTROL over the con- versation being transferred from one person to an- other. We apply a set of rules for the transfer of control to 4 sets of dialogues consisting of a total of 1862 turns. The application of the control …...

In this paper, we represent singular definite noun phrases as functions in logical form. This represen- tation is designed to model the behaviors of both anaphoric and non-anaphoric, distributive definites. It is also designed to obey the computational con- straints suggested in Harper [Har88]. Our initial representation of a definite …...

A compositional semantics for focusing subjuncts-- words such as only, even, and also--is developed from Rooth's theory of association with focus. By adapting the theory so that it can be expressed in terms of a frame-based semantic formalism, a seman- tics that is more computationally practical is arrived at. This …...

In this paper, we present a computational method for transforming a syntactic graph, which represents all syntactic interpretations of a sentence, into a semantic graph which filters out certain interpretations, but also incorporates any remaining ambiguities. We argue that the result- ing ambiguous graph, supported by an exclusion matrix, is …...

The limited capacity of working memory is intrinsic to human sentence processing, and therefore must be addressed by any theory of human sentence processing. This paper gives a theory of garden-path effects and pro- cessing overload that is based on simple as- sumptions about human short term memory capacity. 1...

We present a new grammatical formalism called Con- straint Dependency Grammar (CDG) in which every grammatical rule is given as a constraint on word- to-word modifications. CDG parsing is formalized as a constraint satisfaction problem over a finite do- main so that efficient constraint-propagation algo- rithms can be employed to …...

We describe the modification of a grammar to take advantage of prosodic information provided by a speech recognition system. This initial study is lim- ited to the use of relative duration of phonetic seg- ments in the assignment of syntactic structure, specif- ically in ruling out alternative parses in otherwise …...

In this paper we present a polynomial time pars- ing algorithm for Combinatory Categorial Grammar. The recognition phase extends the CKY algorithm for CFG. The process of generating a representation of the parse trees has two phases. Initially, a shared for- est is build that encodes the set of all …...

This empirical study attempts to find answers to the question of how a natural language (henceforth NL) system could resolve attachment of preposi- tional phrases (henceforth PPs) by examining nat- urally occurring PP attachments in typed dialogue. Examination includes testing predictive powers of existing attachment theories against the data. The …...

In this paper we describe a method for automatically discovering subsets of contextual factors which, taken together, axe useful for predicting the realizations, or pronunciations, of English words for contin- uous speech recognition. A decision tree is used for organizing contextual descriptions of phonological variation. This representation enables us to …...

Recent theories of focusing and reference rely crucially on discourse structure to constrain the availability of discourse entities for reference, but deriving the structure of an arbitrary discourse has proved to be a significant problem. A useful level of problem reduction may be achieved by analyzing discourse in which the …...

Performance in speech recognition systems has progressed to the point where it is now realistic to begin integrating speech with natural language systems to produce spoken language systems. Two factors have contributed to the advances in speech: statistical modeling of the input signal and language constraints. To produce spoken language …...

SRI has developed a new architecture for integrating speech and natural-language processing that applies linguistic constraints during recognition by incrementally expanding the state-transition network embodied in a unification grammar. We compare this dynamic-gralnlnar-network (DGN) approach to its principal alternative, word-lattice parsing, presenting preliminary experimental results that suggest the DGN approach …...

SRI has developed a speaker-independent con- tinuous speech, large vocabulary speech recogni- tion system, DECIPHER, that provides state-of-the- art performance on the DARPA standard speaker- independent resource management training and test- ing materials. SRI's approach is to integrate speech and linguistic knowledge into the HMM framework. This paper describes performance …...

If natural language question-answering (NLQA) systems are to be truly effective and useful, they must respond to queries cooperatively, recognizing and accommodating in their replies a questioner's goals, plans, and needs. This paper concerns the design of cooperative response generation (CRG) systems, NLQA systems that are able to produce integrated …...