An MG Parsing View into the Processing of Subject and Object Relative Clauses in Basque

Stabler (2013)\u27s top-down parser for Minimalist grammars has been used to account for a variety of off-line processing preferences, with measures of memory load sensitive to subtle structural details. This paper expands the model\u27s empirical coverage to ergative languages by looking at the processing asymmetries reported for Basque relative clauses. Our results show that the model predicts a subject over object preference as identified in the relevant psycholinguistic literature

Developing a TT-MCTAG for German with an RCG-based parser

Developing linguistic resources, in particular grammars, is known to be a complex task in itself, because of (amongst others) redundancy and consistency issues. Furthermore some languages can reveal themselves hard to describe because of specific characteristics, e.g. the free word order in German. In this context, we present (i) a framework allowing to describe tree-based grammars, and (ii) an actual fragment of a core multicomponent tree-adjoining grammar with tree tuples (TT-MCTAG) for German developed using this framework. This framework combines a metagrammar compiler and a parser based on range concatenation grammar (RCG) to respectively check the consistency and the correction of the grammar. The German grammar being developed within this framework already deals with a wide range of scrambling and extraction phenomena

Syntactic Nuclei in Dependency Parsing -- A Multilingual Exploration

Standard models for syntactic dependency parsing take words to be the elementary units that enter into dependency relations. In this paper, we investigate whether there are any benefits from enriching these models with the more abstract notion of nucleus proposed by Tesni\`{e}re. We do this by showing how the concept of nucleus can be defined in the framework of Universal Dependencies and how we can use composition functions to make a transition-based dependency parser aware of this concept. Experiments on 12 languages show that nucleus composition gives small but significant improvements in parsing accuracy. Further analysis reveals that the improvement mainly concerns a small number of dependency relations, including nominal modifiers, relations of coordination, main predicates, and direct objects.Comment: Accepted at EACL-202

Relative clauses in Cantonese-English bilingual children: Typological challenges and processing motivations

Findings from a longitudinal study of bilingual children acquiring Cantonese and English pose a challenge to the noun phrase accessibility hierarchy (NPAH; Keenan & Comrie, 1977), which predicts that object relatives should not be acquired before subject relatives. In the children's Cantonese, object relatives emerged earlier than or simultaneously with subject relatives, and in their English, prenominal relatives based on Cantonese emerged first, with object relatives followed by subject relatives. These findings are discussed in light of findings on the typology and acquisition of relative clauses (RCs) and the underlying processing motivations of the NPAH. Prenominal object relatives in the bilingual children's Cantonese and English have the same word order as main clauses and can be analyzed as internally headed RCs. The reconceptualization of RCs as attributive clauses (Comrie, 1998a, 1998b, 2002) is supported by children's early RCs lacking a strict grammatical relationship between the head noun and the predicate. Furthermore, as observed by Diessel and Tomasello (2000, 2005) for English, bilingual children's earliest RCs consist of isolated noun phrases (NPs). The early object relatives produced by bilingual children are therefore essentially NPs with the linear order of a main clause, resulting in a configuration that is conducive to early production. © 2007 Cambridge University Press.published_or_final_versio

English Right Dislocation

A number of researchers claim that the derivation of the Right Dislocation Construction (RDC) involves movement (e.g.

Capturing and Parsing the Mixed Properties of Light Verb Constructions in a Typed Feature Structure Grammar

One of the most widely used constructions in Korean is the so-called light verb construction (LVC) involving an active-denoting verbal noun (VN) together with the light verb ha-ta ‘do’. This paper first discusses the argument composition of the LVC, mixed properties of VNs which have provided a challenge to syntactic analyses with a strict version of X-bar theory. The paper shows the mechanism of multiple classification of category types with systematic inheritance can provide an effective way of capturing these mixed properties. The paper then restates the argument composition properties of the LVC and reenforces them with a constraint-based analysis. This paper also offers answers to the the puzzling syntactic variations in the LVC. Following these empirical and theoretical discussions is a short report on the implementation of the analysis within the LKB (Linguistics Knowledge Building) system

Modeling information structure in a cross-linguistic perspective

This study makes substantial contributions to both the theoretical and computational treatment of information structure, with a specific focus on creating natural language processing applications such as multilingual machine translation systems. The present study first provides cross-linguistic findings in regards to information structure meanings and markings. Building upon such findings, the current model represents information structure within the HPSG/MRS framework using Individual Constraints. The primary goal of the present study is to create a multilingual grammar model of information structure for the LinGO Grammar Matrix system. The present study explores the construction of a grammar library for creating customized grammar incorporating information structure and illustrates how the information structure-based model improves performance of transfer-based machine translation

JACY - a grammar for annotating syntax, semantics and pragmatics of written and spoken japanese for NLP application purposes

In this text, we describe the development of a broad coverage grammar for Japanese that has been built for and used in different application contexts. The grammar is based on work done in the Verbmobil project (Siegel 2000) on machine translation of spoken dialogues in the domain of travel planning. The second application for JACY was the automatic email response task. Grammar development was described in Oepen et al. (2002a). Third, it was applied to the task of understanding material on mobile phones available on the internet, while embedded in the project DeepThought (Callmeier et al. 2004, Uszkoreit et al. 2004). Currently, it is being used for treebanking and ontology extraction from dictionary definition sentences by the Japanese company NTT (Bond et al. 2004)