This paper discusses SYNTAGMA, a rule based NLP system addressing the tricky issues of syntactic ambiguity reduction and word sense disambiguation as well as providing innovative and original solutions for constituent generation and constraints management. To provide an insight into how it operates, the system's general architecture and components, as well as its lexical, syntactic and semantic...

In this paper, we present a computational method for transforming a syntactic graph, which represents all syntactic interpretations of a sentence, into a semantic graph which filters out certain interpretations, but also incorporates any remaining ambiguities. We argue that the resulting ambiguous graph, supported by an exclusion matrix, is a useful data structure for question answering and oth...

Part of speech taggers based on Hidden Markov Models rely on a series of hypotheses which make certain errors inevitable. The idea developed in this paper consists in allowing a limited, controlled ambiguity in the output of the tagger in order to avoid a number of errors. The ambiguity takes the form of ambiguous tags which denote subsets of the tagset. These tags are used when the tagger hesi...

Gibson and Sch€ utze (1999) showed that on-line disambiguation preferences do not always mirror corpus frequencies. When presented with a syntactic ambiguity involving the conjunction of a noun phrase to three possible attachment sites, participants were faster to read attachments to the first site than attachments to the second one, although the latter were shown to be more frequent in text co...

EXPERIMENTS with word-for-word MT of Russian scientific literature have given results which, except for such limited purposes as indexing, are far from satisfactory. The difficulty is not so much one of word order as of syntactic and semantic ambiguity of individual words. Regardless of the treatment of the problem of inflected forms, for example, it is impossible in the majority of instances t...

In this paper we study various reasons and mechanisms for combining Supertagging with Lexicalized Tree-Adjoining Grammar (LTAG) parsing. Because of the highly lexicalized nature of the LTAG formalism, we experimentally show that notions other than sentence length play a factor in observed parse times. In particular, syntactic lexical ambiguity and sentence complexity (both are terms we define i...

Lexical attributes, like syntactic (part-of-speech) and semantic (semantic category) attributes, are in most cases, ambiguous in every languages. Automatic resolution of ambiguity of these attributes can be achieved using different techniques; rule-based, statistical, NN-based and their hybrids. Moreover, one linguistic feature also has influence over the resolution of ambiguity of another feat...

This article examines how certain types of semantic and discourse context affect the processing of relative clauses which are temporarily ambiguous between a relative clause and a main clause (e.g., "The actress selected by the director ..."). We review recent results investigating local semantic context and temporal context, and we present some new data investigating referential contexts. The ...

A Computational Model of Syntactic Processing Ambiguity Resolution from Interpretation Michael Niv Mark J Steedman Supervisor Syntactic ambiguity abounds in natural language yet humans have no di culty coping with it In fact the process of ambiguity resolution is almost always unconscious But it is not infallible however as example demonstrates The horse raced past the barn fell This sentence i...

The size and probability distribution of a word-form’s cohort of lexical competitors influence auditory processing and can be constrained by syntactic category information. This experiment employs noun/verb homonyms (e.g. “ache”) presented in syntactic context to clarify the mechanisms and representations involved in context-based cohort restriction. Implications for theories positing single ve...