Articles

One way of characterising texts is in terms of the discourse structures on which they appear to be built. Each type of text, or genre, e.g. the sports report, the recipe, the sermon, the proverb, will have associated with it a characteristic organisation of units. In this paper, a general …...

Although the formalisms normally used for describ- ing the semantics of natural languages are far from computationally tractable, it is possible to isolate particular semantic phenomena and interpret them within simpler formal systems. Quantified mass noun phrases is one such part. We describe a simple formal system suitable for the …...

We propose an apparently minor extension to Kay's (1985} notation for describing directed acyclic graphs (DAGs}. The proposed notation permits concise descriptions of phenomena which would otherwise be difficult to describe, with- out incurring significant extra computational over- heads in the process of unification. We illustrate the notation with examples …...

Feature Unification can be integrated with Lam- bek Theorem Proving in a simple and straightfor- ward way. Two principles determine all distribu- tion of features in LTP. It is not necessary to stip- ulate other principles or include category-valued features where other theories do. The structure of categories is discussed …...

This paper shows how higher levels of general- ization can be introduced into unification gram- mars by exploiting methods for typing grammati- cal objects. We discuss the strategy of using global declarations to limit possible linguistic structures, and sketch a few unusual aspects of our type- checking algorithm. We also …...

This paper discusses the application of a previously reported theory of explanation rhetoric (Maybury, 1988b) to the task of explaining constraint violations in a hybrid rule/frame based system for resource allocation (Dawson et al, 1987). This research illustrates how discourse strategies of explanation, textual connectives, and additional justification knowledge can …...

Approximately, 10,000 naturally occurring noun phrases taken from the LOB corpus were used firstly, to evaluate the NP component of the Alvey ANLT grammar (Grover et al., 1987, 1989) and secondly, to retest Sampson's (1987a) claim that this data provide evidence for the lack of a clear-cut distinction between grammatical …...

Dialogue is a cooperative process in which each speech act of the participants con- tributes to the overall purpose of the dia- logne. Participating in a full dialogue im- plies understanding at each point of the dialogue session the role of each speech act with respect to the rest of …...

The interpretation of plural anaphora often requires the construction of complex reference objects (RefOs) out of RefOs which were formerly introduced not by plural terms but by a number of singular terms only. Often, several complex RefOs can be constructed, but only one of them is the preferred referent for …...

The paper proposes a paradigmatic approach to morphological knowledge acquisition. It ad- dresses the problem of learning from examples rules for word-forms analysis and synthesis. These rules, established by generalizing the train- ing data sets, are effectively used by a built-in in- terpreter which acts consequently as a morphological processor …...

The SRI Core Language Engine (CLE) is a general-purpose natural language front end for interactive systems. It trans- lates English expressions into representa- tions of their literal meanings. This paper , presents the lexical acquisition component of the CLE, which allows the creation of lexicon entries by users with knowledge …...

The paper presents some of the results obtained within a research project aimed at developing ET (English Tutor), an intelligent tutoring system which supports Italian students in learning the English verbs. We concentrate on one of the most important modules of the system, the domain (i.e. verb) expert which is …...

This paper presents a critical discussion of the vari- ous approaches that have been used in the evaluation of Natural Language systems. We conclude that pre- vious approaches have neglected to evaluate systems in the context of their use, e.g. solving a task requir- ing data retrieval. This raises questions …...

In this paper we discuss an algorithm for the assignment of pitch accent positions in text-to-speech conversion. The algorithm is closely modeled on current linoulstic accounts of accent placement, and assumes a surface syntactic analysis of the input. It comprises a small number of heuristic rules for determining which phrases …...

In this paper we present a logical treatment of semi- free word order and bounded discontinuous constituency. We extend standard feature value logics to treat word order in a single formalism with a rigorous semantics without phrase structure rules. The elimination of phrase structure rules allows a natural generalisation of …...

In this paper, we present a logic-based computational model for movement theory in Government and Binding Theory. For that purpose, we have designed a language called DISLOG. DISLOG stands for programming in logic with discontinuities and permits to express in a simple, concise and declarative way relations or constraints between …...

DATR is a declarative language for representing a restricted class of inheritance networks, permit- ting both multiple and default inheritance. The principal intended area of application is the representation of lexical entries for natural language processing, and we use examples from this domain throughout. In this paper we present the …...

We present a cost-based (or energy-based) model of dis- ambiguation. When a sentence is ambiguous, a parse with the least cost is chosen from among multiple hypotheses. Each hypothesis is assigned a cost which is added when: (1) a new instance is created to satisfy reference success, (2) links between …...

We present a notation for the declarative statement of morphological relationships and lexieal rules, based on the traditional notion of Word and Paradigm (cf Hockett 1954). The phenomenon of blocking arises from a generalized version of Kiparsky's (1973) Elsewhere Condition, stated in terms of ordering by subsumption over paradigms. Orthographic …...

A proposal to deal with French tenses in the frame- work of Discourse Representation Theory is pre- sented, as it has been implemented for a fragment at the IMS. It is based on the theory of tenses of H. Kamp and Ch. Rohrer. Instead of using operators to express the …...