Incremental Interpretation of Categorial Grammar

Abstract

The paper describes a parser for Categorial Grammar which provides fully word by word incremental interpretation. The parser does not require fragments of sentences to form constituents, and thereby avoids problems of spurious ambiguity. The paper includes a brief discussion of the relationship between basic Categorial Grammar and other formalisms such as HPSG, Dependency Grammar and the Lambek Calculus. It also includes a discussion of some of the issues which arise when parsing lexicalised grammars, and the possibilities for using statistical techniques for tuning to particular languages. 1 Introduction There is a large body of psycholinguistic evidence which suggests that meaning can be extracted before the end of a sentence, and before the end of phrasal constituents (e.g. Marslen-Wilson 1973, Tanenhaus et al. 1990). There is also recent evidence suggesting that, during speech processing, partial interpretations can be built extremely rapidly, even before words are completed (Sp..