Embodied construction grammar as layered modal languages

Authors:
Anders Søgaard
Affiliations:
Center for Language Technology, Copenhagen
Venue:
ScaNaLU '06 Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Scalable Natural Language Understanding
Year:
2006

Citing 4
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Abstract

One can think of scalability in terms of complexity or granularity, but in both cases, modal languages seem to be of interest: Modal languages are robustly decidable, and they encode in a natural way the idea of refinement by layering, which implies scalability in terms of granularity. The contribution of this paper is to introduce the general technique of translating problems of scalable natural language understanding into layered modal languages; for illustration, a translation is sketched for Embodied Construction Grammar (ECG). On the basis of this translation, an upper bound on the complexity of ECG is established: the universal recognition problem of ECG is solvable in EXPTIME (if some dynamic resetting is assumed). If the use of the evokes-operator is polynomially bound, the recognition problem turns NP-complete.