Articles

This paper describes a computational model of concept acquisition for natural language. We develop a theory of lexical semantics, the Eztended Aspect Calculus, which together with a ~maxkedness theory" for thematic rela- tions, constrains what a possible word meaning can be. This is based on the supposition that predicates from …...

Cue phrases are words and phrases such as now and by the way which may be used to convey explicit information about the structure of a discourse. However, while cue phrases may convey discourse structure, each may also be used to different effect. The question of how speakers and hearers …...

In this paper we present a formalization of the center- ing approach to modeling attentional structure in dis- course and use it as the basis for an algorithm to track discourse context and bind pronouns. As described in [GJW86], the process of centering attention on en- tities in the discourse …...

This paper gives an account of the role tense plays in the listener's reconstruction of the events and situations a speaker has chosen to describe. Several new ideas are presented: (a) that tense is better viewed by analogy with definite NPs than with pronouns; (b) that a narrative has a …...

We describe a program for assigning correct stress contours to nominals in English. It makes use of idiosyncratic knowledge about the stress behavior of various nominal types and general knowledge about English stress rules. We have also investigated the related issue of parsing complex nominals in English. The importance of …...

Japanese has many noun phrase patterns of the type A no B consisting of two nouns A and B with an adnominal particle no. As the semantic relations between the two nouns in the noun phrase are not made explicit, the interpretation of the phrases depends mainly on the semantic …...

This paper describes the treatment of nomi- nalizations in the PUNDIT text processing system. A single semantic definition is used for both nomi- nalizations and the verbs to which they are related, with the same semantic roles, decomposi- tions, and selectional restrictions on the semantic roles. However, because syntactically nominaliza- …...

Theodes of semantic interpretation which wish to capture as many generalizations as possible must face up to the manifoldly ambiguous and contextually dependent nature of word meaning? In this paper I present a two-level scheme of semantic interpretation in which the first level deals with the semantic con- sequences of'syntactic …...

We prove in this paper that unordered, or ID/LP grammars, are e.xponentially more succinct than context- free grammars, by exhibiting a sequence (L,~) of finite languages such that the size of any CFG for L,~ must grow exponentially in n, but which can be described by polynomial-size ID/LP grammars. The …...

We consider the structural descriptions produced by vari- ous grammatical formalisms in ~ of the complexity of the paths and the relationship between paths in the sets of structural descriptions that each system can generate. In considering the relationship between formalisms, we show that it is useful to abstract away …...

Steedman (1985, 1987) and others have proposed that Categorial Grammar, a theory of syntax in which grammati- cal categories are viewed as functions, be augmented with operators such as functional composition and type raising in order to analyze • noncanonical" syntactic constructions such as wh- extraction and node raising. A …...

We present a model of morphological processing which directly encodes prosodic constituency, a notion which is clearly crucial in many widespread morphological processes. The model has been implemented for the Australian language Warlpiri and has been successfully interfaced with a syntactic parser for that language (Brunson, 1986). We contrast our …...

Noun phrases consisting of a sequence of nouns (sometimes referred to as nominal compounds) pose considerable difficulty for language analyzers but are common in many technical domains. The problems are compounded when some of the nouns in the sequence are ambiguously also verbs. The phrasal approach to language analysis, as …...

The syntactic analysis of languages with respect to Government-binding (GB) grammar is a problem that has received relatively little attention until recently. This paper describes an attribute grammar specification of the Government-binding theory. The paper focuses on the description of the attribution rules responsible for determining antecedent-trace relations in phrase-structure …...

User-adviser dialogues were collected in a typed Wizard- of-Oz study (=man-behind-the-curtain study*). Thirty-two users had to solve simple statistics problems using an un- familiar statistical package. Users received help on how to use the statistical package by typing utterances to what they believed was a computerized adviser. The observed limited …...

This paper presents an expectation-based Japanese- to-English translation system called JETR which relies on the forward expectation-refinement process to handle ungrammatical sentences in an elegant and efficient manner without relying on the presence of particles and verbs in the source text. JETR uses a chain of result states to perform …...

An improved version of IRACQ (for Interpretation Rule ACQuisition) is presented. I Our approach to semantic knowledge acquisition: 1 ) is in the context of a general purpose NL interface rather than one that accesses only databases, 2) employs a knowledge representation formalism with limited inferencing capabilities, 3) assumes a …...

A semantics of linguistic categories like tense, aspect, and cer- tain temporal adverbials, and a theory of their use in defining the temporal relations of events, both require a more complex structure on the domain underlying the meaning representa- tions than is commonly assumed. The paper proposes an ontology based …...

This paper describes a compositional semantics for temporal expressions as part of the meaning representation language (MRL) of the JANUS system, a natural language understanding and generation sys- tem under joint development by BBN Laboratoires and the Information Sciences Institute. 1 The analysis is based on a higher order intansional …...

S Tadaaki Oshio Japan Patent Information Organization 1....