De kunst van het weglaten: Elliptische nevenschikking in een model van de spreker

This paper is an abridged version (in Dutch) of an in-press article by the same author (Kempen, G. (2008/9). Clausal coordination and coordinate ellipsis in a model of the speaker. To be published in: Linguistics). The two papers present a psycholinguistically inspired approach to the syntax of clause-level coordination and coordinate ellipsis. It departs from the assumption that coordinations are structurally similar to so-called appropriateness repairs Ñ an important type of self-repairs in spontaneous speech. Coordinate structures and appropriateness repairs can both be viewed as ÒupdateÓ con-structions. Updating is defined as a special sentence production mode that efficiently revises or augments existing sentential structure in response to modifications in the speakerÕs communicative intention. This perspective is shown to offer an empirically satisfactory and theoretically parsimonious account of two prominent types of coordinate ellipsis, in particular Forward Conjunction Reduction (FCR) and Gapping (including Long-Distance Gapping and Subgapping). They are analyzed as different manifestations of Òincremental updatingÓ Ñ efficient updating of only part of the existing sentential structure. Based on empirical data from Dutch and German, novel treatments are proposed for both types of clausal coordinate ellipsis. Two other forms of coordinate ellipsis Ñ SGF (ÒSubject Gap in Finite clauses with fronted verbÓ), and Backward Conjunction Reduction (BCR; also known as Right Node Raising or RNR) Ñ are shown to be incompatible with the notion of incremental updating. Alternative theoretical interpretations of these phenomena are proposed. The four types of clausal coordinate ellipsis Ñ SGF, Gapping, FCR and BCR Ñ are argued to originate in four different stages of sentence production: Intending (i.e. preparing the communicative intention), Conceptualization, Grammatical Encoding, and Phonological Encoding, respectively

Segment Grammar: A formalism for incremental sentence generation

Incremental sentence generation imposes special constraints on the representation of the grammar and the design of the formulator (the module which is responsible for constructing the syntactic and morphological structure). In the model of natural speech production presented here, a formalism called Segment Grammar is used for the representation of linguistic knowledge. We give a definition of this formalism and present a formulator design which relies on it. Next, we present an object- oriented implementation of Segment Grammar. Finally, we compare Segment Grammar with other formalisms

Incremental syntactic tree formation in human sentence processing: A cognitive architecture based on activation decay and simulated annealing

A new cognitive architecture is proposed for the syntactic aspects of human sentence processing. The architecture, called Unification Space, is biologically inspired but not based on neural nets. Instead it relies on biosynthesis as a basic metaphor. We use simulated annealing as an optimization technique which searches for the best configuration of isolated syntactic segments or subtrees in the final parse tree. The gradually decaying activation of individual syntactic nodes determines the ‘global excitation level’ of the system. This parameter serves the function of ‘computational temperature’ in simulated annealing. We have built a computer implementation of the architecture which simulates well-known sentence understanding phenomena. We report successful simulations of the psycholinguistic effects of clause embedding, minimal attachment, right association and lexical ambiguity. In addition, we simulated impaired sentence understanding as observable in agrammatic patients. Since the Unification Space allows for contextual (semantic and pragmatic) influences on the syntactic tree formation process, it belongs to the class of interactive sentence processing models

A head-driven approach to incremental and parallel generation of syntactic structures

This paper describes the construction of syntactic structures within an incremental multi-level and parallel generation system. Incremental and parallel generation imposes special requirements upon syntactic description and processing. A head-driven grammar represented in a unification-based formalism is introduced which satisfies these demands. Furthermore the basic mechanisms for the parallel processing of syntactic segments are presented

Generierung natürlicher Sprache

Dieser Aufsatz beschreibt das interdisziplinäre Forschungsgebiet Generierung natürlicher Sprache und gibt einen Überblick über den gegenwärtigen Stand der Kunst. Behandelt werden Ansätze aus der Psycholinguistik, Planungs- und Entscheidungsverfahren aus der sprachverarbeitenden KI und Verfahren auf der Grundlage moderner Grammatikformalismen. Die jeweiligen Forschungsziele und -methoden werden dargestellt.This report describes the interdisciplinary research field of natural language generation and gives an overview of the current state of the art. The paper presents psycholinguistic approaches, AI planning and decision-making processes, and generators based on modern grammar formalisms. For each case, the research goals and methods are described