Relating Syntax And Semantics: The Syntactico-Semantic Lexicon Of The System VIE-LANG

This paper describes the structure and evaluation of the syntactico-semantic lexicon (SSL) of the German Natural Language Understanding System VIE-LANG [3]. VIE-LANG uses an SI-Net [2] as internal representation. The SSL contains the rules according to which the mapping between net-structures and surface structures of a sentence is carried out. This information is structured in a way that it can be evaluated from two sides. The parser interprets it as production-rules that control the analysis. Syntactic and semantic features of the input sentence are evaluated and individuals are created in the semantic net. The generator uses the same rules to express selected net-structures in adequate natural language expressions. It is shown how both processes can make effective use of the SSL. The different possibilities for evaluating the SSL are explained and illustrated by examples. I OVERVIEW OF THE SYSTEM VIE-LANG