The paper presents the module of interactive word sense disambiguation and syntactic ambiguity resolution used within a machine translation system, ETAP-3. The method applied consists in asking the user to identify a word sense, or a syntactic interpretation, whenever the system lacks reliable data to make the choice automatically. In lexical disambiguation, part of man-machine dialogue refers ...

In experiments on a natural language information retrieval system that retrieves images based on textual captions, we show that syntactic complexity actually aids retrieval. We compare two types of captioned images, those characterized with full sentences in English, and those characterized by lists of words and phrases. The full-sentence captions show a 15% increase in retrieval accuracy over ...

Three experiments were conducted to investigate the relative timing of syntactic and pragmatic anomaly detection during sentence processing. Experiment 1 was an eye movement study. Experiment 2 employed a dual-task paradigm with compressed speech input, to put the processing routines under time pressure. Experiment 3 used compressed speech input in an anomaly monitoring task. The outcomes of th...

The posterior middle temporal gyrus (MTG) and inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) are two critical nodes of the brain's language network. Previous neuroimaging evidence has supported a dissociation in language comprehension in which parts of the MTG are involved in the retrieval of lexical syntactic information and the IFG in unification operations that maintain, select, and integrate multiple sources...

In this paper, we identify syntactic lexical ambiguity and sentence complexity as factors that contribute to parsing complexity in fully lexicalized grammar formalisms such as Lexicalized Tree Adjoining Grammars. We also report on experiments that explore the effects of these factors on parsing complexity. We discuss how these constraints can be exploited in improving efficiency of parsers for ...

This document surveys the field of research in preposition phrase attachment resolution, looking back at the way the problem was approached in the 1990s, as well as at modern techniques for resolving this basic syntactic ambiguity problem. Techniques are described and compared, and their effectiveness is considered.

A capacity theory of comprehension (M.A. Just & P.A. Carpenter, 1992) has provided an integrated account of several central aspects of sentence comprehension, such as the processing of syntactic ambiguity, complex embeddings, syntactic (non) modularity, and individual differences, in terms of the working-memory capacity for language. Some of the evidence supporting the theory is questioned by G...

Recent work on the nature of syntactic ambiguity has focused on the properties of lexical items that may be relevant to resolving such ambiguities. A variety of lexical properties have been proposed as having significant influence on syntactic ambiguity resolution. Ranging from referential properties (Ni, Crain, & Shankweiler 1996), in the context of the Referential Model of language processing...

This article describes the current state of syntactic analysis of Estonian using Constraint Grammar. Constraint Grammar framework divides parsing into two different modules: morphological disambiguation and determination of syntactic functions. This article focuses on the last module in detail. If the morphological disambiguator achieves the precision more than 85% and error rate is smaller tha...

Reports in the sentence processing literature on whether untrained speakers reliably disambiguate syntactic phrase structure ambiguities with prosody have shown mixed results. Allbritton et al (1996), Straub (1997), and Snedeker et al (1999) found little to no evidence of prosodic disambiguation of syntax when other factors resolved the ambiguity, and argued that prosodic disambiguation is prod...