Cooper’s storage technique for scoping in situ operators has been employed in theoretical and computational grammars of natural language (NL) for over thirty years, but has been widely viewed as ad hoc and unprincipled. Recent work by Pollard within the framework of convergent grammar (CVG) took a step in the direction of clarifying the logical status of Cooper storage by encoding its rules wit...

The evaluation of grammar inference systems is clearly a non-trivial task, as it is possible to have more than one correct grammar for a given language. The 'looks good to me' approach, carried out by computational linguists analysing their own grammar inference system results, has prevailed for many years. This paper explores why this method has been so popular, in terms of its strengths, and ...

The paper proposes that grammar emerges in order to reduce the computational complexity of semantic interpretation and discusses some details of simulations based on Fluid Construction Grammars.

This paper investigates a gradual on-line learning algorithm for Harmonic Grammar. By adapting existing convergence proofs for perceptrons, we show that for any nonvarying target language, Harmonic-Grammar learners are guaranteed to converge to an appropriate grammar, if they receive complete information about the structure of the learning data. We also prove convergence when the learner incorp...

A simple change to a cognitive system at Marr's computational level may entail complex changes at the other levels of description of the system. The implementational level complexity of a change, rather than its computational level complexity, may be more closely related to the plausibility of a discrete evolutionary event causing that change. Thus the formal complexity of a change at the compu...

The evaluation of grammar inference systems is clearly a non-trivial task, as it is possible to have more than one correct grammar for a given language. The ‘looks good to me’ approach, carried out by computational linguists analysing their own grammar inference system results, has prevailed for many years. This paper explores why this method has been so popular, in terms of its strengths, and ...

We adopt the corpus-informed approach to example sentence selections for the construction of a reference grammar. In the process, a database containing sentences that are carefully selected by linguistic experts including the full range of linguistic facts covered in an authoritative Chinese Reference Grammar is constructed and structured according to the reference grammar. A search engine syst...

In this chapter we describe a computational grammar for Basque, and the first results obtained using it in the process of automatically acquiring subcategorization information about verbs and their associated sentence elements (arguments and adjuncts). The first part of this chapter (section 1) will be devoted to the description of Basque syntax, and to present the grammar we have developed. Th...

Unknown words are a hindrance to the performance of hand-crafted computational grammars of natural language. However, words with incomplete and incorrect lexical entries pose an even bigger problem because they can be the cause of a parsing failure despite being listed in the lexicon of the grammar. Such lexical entries are hard to detect and even harder to correct. We employ an error miner to ...

The relationship between linguistic and nonlinguistic cognition is an important area of study including the questions of language modularity and learnability. We believe that insights to this relationship can be obtained by implementing a precise computational model of sentence understanding within a general cognitive architecture. In this paper we have represented a wide-coverage grammar (Head...