Coordination: Some Problems and Solutions for the Analysis of English with an Atn

Coordination is a complex phenomenon that poses many problems for the parsing of English by computer. This paper examines some of these problems and suggests solutions within the framework of ATN parsing. Examples of complex coordination phenomena, extracted from texts translated by ENGSPAN, the Pan American Health Organization's English-Spanish machine translation system, are presented. Schemata for extending simple networks to accommodate coordinate constructions are presented, and strategies for parsing these constructions are discussed. Focus is centered on the complications involved in parsing constructions with more than two conjuncts.