Processing English with a Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar

This paper describes a natural language processing system implemented at Hewlett-Packard's Computer Research Center. The system's main components are: a Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar (GPSG); a top-down parser; a logic t ransducer that outputs a f i r s t o rde r logical representat ion; and a "disambiguator" that uses sortal information to convert "normal-form" f i r s t o rde r logical expressions into the query language for HIRE, a relational database hosted in the SPHERE system. We argue that theoretical developments in GPSG syntax and in Montague semantics have specific advantages to br ing to this domain of computational l inguist ics. The syntax and semantics of the system are tota l ly domain-independent, and thus, in pr inciple, h ighly portable. We discuss the prospects for extending domain-independence to the lexical semantics as well, and thus to the logical semantic representations.