EACL

1. The paper will try to identify the various concurrent factors which, in the last years, have contributed to the increasing attention paid to the issue of reusable linguistic resources for natural language processing. The role of various major ...

This paper analyses the syntax and semantics of English comparatives, and some types of ellipsis. It improves on other recent analyses in the computational linguistics literature in three respects: (i) it uses no tree- or logical-form rewriting devices ...

Multimodal interfaces combining, e.g., natural language and graphics take advantage of both the individual strength of each communication mode and the fact that several modes can be employed in parallel, e.g., in the text-picture combinations of ...

This paper describes a natural language parsing algorithm for unrestricted text which uses a probability-based scoring function to select the "best" parse of a sentence. The parser, Pearl, is a time-asynchronous bottom-up chart parser with Earley-type ...

In this paper a bidirectional parser for Lexicalized Tree Adjoining Grammars will be presented. The algorithm takes advantage of a peculiar characteristic of Lexicalized TAGs, i.e. that each elementary tree is associated with a lexical item, called its ...

The notion of a Horn extended feature structure (HoXF) is introduced, which is a feature structure constrained so that its only allowable extensions are those satisfying some set of Horn clauses in feature-term logic. HoXF's greatly generalize ordinary ...

This work is concerned with the development of instruments for GB parsing. An alternative to the well known indexation system of (Chomsky, 1981) will be proposed and then used to formalize the view of Binding Theory in terms of the generation of ...

Two well-known phenomena in the area of pronoun binding are considered: Indirect binding of pronouns by indefinite NPs ("donkey sentences") and surface-syntactic constraints on binding ("weak cross-over"). A common treatment is proposed, and general ...

Command relations are important tools in linguistics, especially in anaphora theory. In this paper I present an indexing technique which allows us to implement a simple and efficient check for most cases of command relations which have been presented in ...

In this document, we present a language which associates type construction principles to constraint logic programming. We show that it is very appropriate for language processing, providing more uniform, expressive and efficient tools and treatments. We ...

A purely functional implementation of LR-parsers is given, together with a simple correctness proof. It is presented as a generalization of the recursive descent parser. For non-LR grammars the time-complexity of our parser is cubic if the functions ...

This paper proposes an LR parsing algorithm modified for grammars with feature-based categories. The proposed algorithm does not instantiate categories during preprocessing of a grammar as proposed elsewhere. As a result, it constructs a minimal size of ...

What is the relationship between syntax, prosody and phonetics? This paper argues for a declarative constraint-based theory, in which each step in a derivation adds diverse constraints to a pool. Some of these describe well formed objects in the feature ...

This paper presents a human-machine dialogue model in the field of task-oriented dialogues. The originality of this model resides in the clear separation of dialogue knowledge from task knowledge in order to facilitate for the modeling of dialogue ...

Logical approaches to linguistic description, particularly those which employ feature structures, have generally treated phonology as though it was the same as orthography. This approach breaks down for languages where the phonological shape of a ...

The paper presents a morpho-lexical environment, designed for the management of root-oriented natural language dictionaries. It also encapsulates the basic morpho-lexical processings: analysis and synthesis of individual word-forms or compounds (idioms ...

This paper describes a method of analysing words through morphological decomposition when the lexicon is incomplete. The method is used within a text-to-speech system to help generate pronunciations of unknown words. The method is achieved within a ...

This paper describes the application of markovian learning methods to the inference of word transducers. We show how the proposed method dispenses from the difficult design of hand-crafted rules, allows the use of weighed non deterministic transducers ...

A new approach to structure-driven generation is presented that is based on a separate semantics as input structure. For the first time, a GPSG-based formalism is complemented with a system of pattern-action rules that relate the parts of a semantics to ...

Current approaches to generating multi-sentence text fail to consider what the user may infer from the different statements in a description. This paper presents a system which contains an explicit model of the inferences that people may make from ...

Certain pairs or groups of sentences appear to be semantically distinct, yet specify the same underlying state of affairs, from different perspectives. This leads to questions about what that underlying state of affairs might be, and, for generation, ...

Prosodic Inheritance (PI) morphology provides uniform treatment of both concatenative and non-concatenative morphological and phonological generalisations using default inheritance. Models of an extensive range of German Umlaut and Arabic intercalation ...

The representation of lexical entries requires special means which basic PATR systems do not include. The language DATR, however, can be used to define an inheritance network serving as the lexical component. The integration of such a module into an ...

MorP is a system for automatic word class assignment on the basis of surface features. It has a very small lexicon of form words (‰ entries), and for the rest works entirely on morphological and configurational patterns. This makes it robust and fast, ...

A basic problem that must be dealt with in order to build an intelligent tutoring system (ITS) in the domain of foreign language teaching is that of establishing what kind of grammatical knowledge has to be included in the domain expert module. Two ...

Given a grammar for a language, it is possible to create finite state mechanisms that approximate its recognition capacity. These simple automata consider only short context information, drawn from local syntactic constraints which the grammar imposes. ...

In this paper, we review Dale's [1989] algorithm for determining the content of a referring expression. The algorithm, which only permits the use of one-place predicates, it revised and extended to deal with n-ary predicates. We investigate the problem ...

Within unification-based grammar formalisms, providing a treatment of cross-categorial coordination is problematic, and most current solutions either over-generate or under-generate. In this paper we consider an approach to coordination involving "...

We present the formal processing model of CLG, a logic grammar formalism based on complex constraint resolution. In particular, we show how to monotonically extend terms and their unification to constrained terms and their resolution. The simple CLG ...