The psycholinguistic literature has identified two syntactic adaptation effects in language production: rapidly decaying short-term priming and long-lasting adaptation. To explain both effects, we present an ACT-R model of syntactic priming based on a wide-coverage, lexicalized syntactic theory that explains priming as facilitation of lexical access. In this model, two well-established ACT-R me...

Information about the syntactic category of a word can be derived from a number of complementary sources. We focus here on phonological and distributional cues for distinguishing nouns and verbs that have been proposed as useful for language acquisition. In this paper we assessed the extent to which this information affects lexical processing in adults. We hypothesised that the phonological or ...

While the choice of morphological markers is lexically determined and highly idiosyncratic – fahren/Fahrt (drive/drive) vs. erklären/Erklärung (explain/explanation)-, syntactic combination follows general rules: the verb assigns nominative and accusative case to the subject and direct object, the derived noun systematically requires genitive case for both complements. These observations exhaust...

The success of supervised learning approaches to word sense disambiguation is largely dependent on the features used to represent the context in which an ambiguous word occurs. Previous work has reached mixed conclusions; some suggest that combinations of syntactic and lexical features will perform most effectively. However, others have shown that simple lexical features perform well on their o...

Most document classification systems consider only the distribution of content words of the documents, ignoring the syntactic information underlying the documents though it is also an important factor. In this paper, we present an approach for classifying large scale unstructured documents by incorporating both lexical and syntactic information of documents. For this purpose, we use the co-trai...

The earliest work on automatic detection of implicit discourse relations relied on lexical features. More recently, researchers have demonstrated that syntactic features are superior to lexical features for the task. In this paper we re-examine the two classes of state of the art representations: syntactic production rules and word pair features. In particular, we focus on the need to reduce sp...

Unrestricted text analysis requires an accurate syntactic analysis but structural ambiguity is one of the most difficult problems to resolve. Researchers have tried different approaches to obtain the correct syntactic structure from analyzed sentences but not successful results have been obtained. Two different approaches have traditionally applied to syntactic analysis: constituent grammars an...

Where does a verb’s frame come from? The obvious answer is the verb itself, and this is the answer that syntacticians have traditionally provided, whether they describe predicator-argument relations as syntactic sisterhood relations or as lexical properties (the predicator’s combinatoric potential, or valence). Thus, Haegeman, in her introduction to Government and Binding theory, states, “the t...

Sentences with embedding are more complex than sentences without embedding, because they contain more syntactic layers in their phrasal architecture. Until now, neuroimaging studies tested embedded sentences that also included syntactic movement. To explore which cortical areas are specifically involved in the processing of syntactic layers, we used embedded sentences that did not include synta...

In this paper we discuss particular choices we made during the development of a rule-based syntactic text simplification system. Such choices concern 1) how to deal with adverbial phrases in order to simplify sentences, and 2) the order in which to apply our set of simplification rules. Adverbial phrases have not been considered by previous work on text simplification, but have a considerable i...