Lexical Conceptual Structure (LCS) represents verbs as semantic structures with a limited number of semantic predicates. This paper attempts to exploit how LCS can be used to explain the regularities underlying lexical and syntactic paraphrases, such as verb alternation, compound word decomposition, and lexical derivation. We propose a paraphrase generation model which transforms LCSs of verbs,...

This paper discusses the difficulties in Chinese deep parsing, by comparing the accuracy of a Chinese HPSG parser to the accuracy of an English HPSG parser and the commonly used Chinese syntactic parsers. Analysis reveals that deep parsing for Chinese is more challenging than for English, due to the shortage of syntactic constraints of Chinese verbs, the widespread pro-drop, and the large distr...

Certain Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications such as parsing and semantic processing require complete lexicons that provide subcategorization information for a word of interest, i.e. the necessary information about the set(s) of syntactic constituents the word must combine with, in order for its meaning to be fully expressed. Modern Greek presents high flexibility in the allowable ord...

We propose a formal characterization of variation in the syntactic realization of semantic arguments, using hierarchies of syntactic relations and thematic roles, and a mechanism of lexical inheritance to obtain valency frames from individual linking types. We embed the formalization in the new lexicalized, dependency-based grammar formalism of Topological Dependency Grammar (TDG) (Duchier and ...

In this paper, we introduce a system, Sentence Planning Using Description, which generates collocations within the paradigm of sentence planning. SPUD simultaneously constructs the semantics and syntax of a sentence using a Lexicalized Tree Adjoining Grammar (LTAG). This approach captures naturally and elegantly the interaction between pragmatic and syntactic constraints on descriptions in a se...

Coordination of phrases of different syntactic categories has posed a problem for generative systems based only on syntactic categories. Although some prefer to treat them as exceptional cases that should require some extra mechanism (as for elliptical constructions), or to allow for unrestricted cross-category coordination, they can be naturally derived in a grammatic functional generative app...

Introduction NPs like other constituents generally have syntactic functions that are associated with specific interpretations. They may not only have one such semantically relevant syntactic function, but also a combination of them. Syntacticians have traditionally directed their attention to only a certain number of semantically relevant syntactic functions of NPs, in particular to the status ...

How children go about learning the general regularities that govern language, as well as keeping track of the exceptions to them, remains one of the challenging open questions in the cognitive science of language. Computational modeling is an important methodology in research aimed at addressing this issue. We must determine appropriate learning mechanisms that can grasp generalizations from ex...

In this paper, we focus on the verb-particle (V-Prt) split construction in English and German and its difficulty for parsing and Machine Translation (MT). For German, we use an existing test suite of V-Prt split constructions, while for English, we build a new and comparable test suite from raw data. These two data sets are then used to perform an analysis of errors in dependency parsing, word-...

We adopt a theory of relativisation based on the idea that relatives, like wh-constructions in the analysis of Chomsky (1998), require two sorts of features to construct their LF-interpretation. We argue that it is the variable interpetability of these features that gives rise to different syntactic patterns. We use this theory to provide an explanation for some curious syntactic facts found in...