24 research outputs found
An earley parsing algorithm for range concatenation grammars
We present a CYK and an Earley-style algorithm for parsing Range Concatenation Grammar (RCG), using the deductive parsing framework. The characteristic property of the Earley parser is that we use a technique of range boundary constraint propagation to compute the yields of non-terminals as late as possible. Experiments show that, compared to previous approaches, the constraint propagation helps to considerably decrease the number of items in the chart
Quantifier scope in German : an MCTAG analysis
Relative quantifier scope in German depends, in contrast to English, very much on word order. The scope possibilities of a quantifier are determined by its surface position, its base position and the type of the quantifier. In this paper we propose a multicomponent analysis for German quantifiers computing the scope of the quantifier, in particular its minimal nuclear scope, depending on the syntactic configuration it occurs in
Factorizing complementation in a TT-MCTAG for German
TT-MCTAG lets one abstract away from the relative order of co-complements in the final derived tree, which is more appropriate than classic TAG when dealing with flexible word order in German. In this paper, we present the analyses for sentential complements, i.e., wh-extraction, thatcomplementation and bridging, and we work out the crucial differences between these and respective accounts in XTAG (for English) and V-TAG (for German)
A declarative characterization of different types of multicomponent tree adjoining grammars
Multicomponent Tree Adjoining Grammars (MCTAG) is a formalism that has been shown to be useful for many natural language applications. The definition of MCTAG however is problematic since it refers to the process of the derivation itself: a simultaneity constraint must be respected concerning the way the members of the elementary tree sets are added. This way of characterizing MCTAG does not allow to abstract away from the concrete order of derivation. In this paper, we propose an alternative definition of MCTAG that characterizes the trees in the tree language of an MCTAG via the properties of the derivation trees (in the underlying TAG) the MCTAG licences. This definition gives a better understanding of the formalism, it allows a more systematic comparison of different types of MCTAG, and, furthermore, it can be exploited for parsing
D-Tree Grammars
DTG are designed to share some of the advantages of TAG while overcoming some
of its limitations. DTG involve two composition operations called subsertion
and sister-adjunction. The most distinctive feature of DTG is that, unlike TAG,
there is complete uniformity in the way that the two DTG operations relate
lexical items: subsertion always corresponds to complementation and
sister-adjunction to modification. Furthermore, DTG, unlike TAG, can provide a
uniform analysis for em wh-movement in English and Kashmiri, despite the fact
that the em wh element in Kashmiri appears in sentence-second position, and not
sentence-initial position as in English.Comment: Latex source, needs aclap.sty, 8 pages, to appear in ACL-9
A linear time extension of deterministic pushdown automata
Proceedings of the 17th Nordic Conference of Computational Linguistics
NODALIDA 2009.
Editors: Kristiina Jokinen and Eckhard Bick.
NEALT Proceedings Series, Vol. 4 (2009), 182-189.
© 2009 The editors and contributors.
Published by
Northern European Association for Language
Technology (NEALT)
http://omilia.uio.no/nealt .
Electronically published at
Tartu University Library (Estonia)
http://hdl.handle.net/10062/9206
Verifying context-sensitive treebanks and heuristic parses in polynomial time
Proceedings of the 17th Nordic Conference of Computational Linguistics
NODALIDA 2009.
Editors: Kristiina Jokinen and Eckhard Bick.
NEALT Proceedings Series, Vol. 4 (2009), 190-197.
© 2009 The editors and contributors.
Published by
Northern European Association for Language
Technology (NEALT)
http://omilia.uio.no/nealt .
Electronically published at
Tartu University Library (Estonia)
http://hdl.handle.net/10062/9206
Lexicalized non-local MCTAG with dominance links is NP-complete
An NP-hardness proof for non-local Multicomponent Tree Adjoining Grammar
(MCTAG) by Rambow and Satta (1st International Workshop on Tree
Adjoining Grammers 1992), based on Dahlhaus and Warmuth (in J Comput
Syst Sci 33:456–472, 1986), is extended to some linguistically
relevant restrictions of that formalism. It is found that there are
NP-hard grammars among non-local MCTAGs even if any or all of the
following restrictions are imposed: (i) lexicalization: every tree in
the grammar contains a terminal; (ii) dominance links: every tree set
contains at most two trees, and in every such tree set, there is a link
between the foot node of one tree and the root node of the other tree,
indicating that the former node must dominate the latter in the derived
tree. This is the version of MCTAG proposed in Becker et al.
(Proceedings of the 5th conference of the European chapter of the
Association for Computational Linguistics 1991) to account for German
long-distance scrambling. This result restricts the field of possible
candidates for an extension of Tree Adjoining Grammar that would be both
mildly context-sensitive and linguistically adequate
A Processing Model for Free Word Order Languages
Like many verb-final languages, Germn displays considerable word-order
freedom: there is no syntactic constraint on the ordering of the nominal
arguments of a verb, as long as the verb remains in final position. This effect
is referred to as ``scrambling'', and is interpreted in transformational
frameworks as leftward movement of the arguments. Furthermore, arguments from
an embedded clause may move out of their clause; this effect is referred to as
``long-distance scrambling''. While scrambling has recently received
considerable attention in the syntactic literature, the status of long-distance
scrambling has only rarely been addressed. The reason for this is the
problematic status of the data: not only is long-distance scrambling highly
dependent on pragmatic context, it also is strongly subject to degradation due
to processing constraints. As in the case of center-embedding, it is not
immediately clear whether to assume that observed unacceptability of highly
complex sentences is due to grammatical restrictions, or whether we should
assume that the competence grammar does not place any restrictions on
scrambling (and that, therefore, all such sentences are in fact grammatical),
and the unacceptability of some (or most) of the grammatically possible word
orders is due to processing limitations. In this paper, we will argue for the
second view by presenting a processing model for German.Comment: 23 pages, uuencoded compressed ps file. In {\em Perspectives on
Sentence Processing}, C. Clifton, Jr., L. Frazier and K. Rayner, editors.
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 199