6,487 research outputs found
Linear Logic for Meaning Assembly
Semantic theories of natural language associate meanings with utterances by
providing meanings for lexical items and rules for determining the meaning of
larger units given the meanings of their parts. Meanings are often assumed to
combine via function application, which works well when constituent structure
trees are used to guide semantic composition. However, we believe that the
functional structure of Lexical-Functional Grammar is best used to provide the
syntactic information necessary for constraining derivations of meaning in a
cross-linguistically uniform format. It has been difficult, however, to
reconcile this approach with the combination of meanings by function
application. In contrast to compositional approaches, we present a deductive
approach to assembling meanings, based on reasoning with constraints, which
meshes well with the unordered nature of information in the functional
structure. Our use of linear logic as a `glue' for assembling meanings allows
for a coherent treatment of the LFG requirements of completeness and coherence
as well as of modification and quantification.Comment: 19 pages, uses lingmacros.sty, fullname.sty, tree-dvips.sty,
latexsym.sty, requires the new version of Late
Textual Economy through Close Coupling of Syntax and Semantics
We focus on the production of efficient descriptions of objects, actions and
events. We define a type of efficiency, textual economy, that exploits the
hearer's recognition of inferential links to material elsewhere within a
sentence. Textual economy leads to efficient descriptions because the material
that supports such inferences has been included to satisfy independent
communicative goals, and is therefore overloaded in Pollack's sense. We argue
that achieving textual economy imposes strong requirements on the
representation and reasoning used in generating sentences. The representation
must support the generator's simultaneous consideration of syntax and
semantics. Reasoning must enable the generator to assess quickly and reliably
at any stage how the hearer will interpret the current sentence, with its
(incomplete) syntax and semantics. We show that these representational and
reasoning requirements are met in the SPUD system for sentence planning and
realization.Comment: 10 pages, uses QobiTree.te
CHR Grammars
A grammar formalism based upon CHR is proposed analogously to the way
Definite Clause Grammars are defined and implemented on top of Prolog. These
grammars execute as robust bottom-up parsers with an inherent treatment of
ambiguity and a high flexibility to model various linguistic phenomena. The
formalism extends previous logic programming based grammars with a form of
context-sensitive rules and the possibility to include extra-grammatical
hypotheses in both head and body of grammar rules. Among the applications are
straightforward implementations of Assumption Grammars and abduction under
integrity constraints for language analysis. CHR grammars appear as a powerful
tool for specification and implementation of language processors and may be
proposed as a new standard for bottom-up grammars in logic programming.
To appear in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP), 2005Comment: 36 pp. To appear in TPLP, 200
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