On building a more efficient grammar by exploiting types
Natural Language Engineering
An algebra for semantic construction in constraint-based grammars
ACL '01 Proceedings of the 39th Annual Meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics
COLING-GEE '02 Proceedings of the 2002 workshop on Grammar engineering and evaluation - Volume 15
Argument optionality in the LinGO grammar matrix
COLING '10 Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Posters
Research on Language and Computation
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This paper presents suggested semantic representations for different types of referring expressions in the format of Minimal Recursion Semantics and sketches syntactic analyses which can create them compositionally. We explore cross-linguistic harmonization of these representations, to promote interoperability and reusability of linguistic analyses. We follow Borthen and Haugereid (2005) in positing COG-ST ('cognitive status') as a feature on the syntax-semantics interface to handle phenomena associated with definiteness. Our proposal helps to unify the treatments of definiteness markers, demonstratives, overt pronouns and null anaphora across languages. In languages with articles, they contribute an existential quantifier and the appropriate value for COG-ST. In other languages, the COG-ST value is determined by an affix. The contribution of demonstrative determiners is decomposed into a COG-ST value, a quantifier, and proximity information, each of which can be contributed by a different kind of grammatical construction in a given language. Along with COG-ST, we posit a feature that distinguishes between pronouns (and null anaphora) that are sensitive to the identity of the referent of their antecedent and those that are sensitive to its type.