The exploitation of syntactic structures and semantic background knowledge has always been an appealing subject in the context of text retrieval and information management. The usefulness of this kind of information has been shown most prominently in highly specialized tasks, such as classification in Question Answering (QA) scenarios. So far, however, additional syntactic or semantic informati...

This paper reports a cross-linguistic investigation into the syntax-prosody mapping in German and Hindi. For both languages, comparable speech production experiments were carried out, using ambiguous coordination structures with four names in different syntactic conditions. Pitch contours and duration values were compared at syntactic boundaries of the different coordination structures within a...

Linguistic information can help improve evaluation of similarity between documents; however, the kind of linguistic information to be used depends on the task. In this paper, we show that distributions of syntactic structures capture the way works are written and accurately identify individual books more than 76% of the time. In comparison, baseline features, e.g., tfidf-weighted keywords, func...

Speakers only sometimes include the that in sentence complement structures like The coach knew (that) you missed practice. Six experiments tested the predictions concerning optional word mention of two general approaches to language production. One approach claims that language production processes choose syntactic structures that ease the task of creating sentences, so that words are spoken op...

Syntactic structures based on standard syntactic assignments model knowledge directly rather than as truth in all possible worlds as in modal epistemic logic, by assigning arbitrary truth values to atomic epistemic formulae. This approach to epistemic logic is very general and is used in several logical frameworks modeling multi-agent systems, but has no interesting logical properties — partly ...

In this paper we present a hybrid approach to resolve Entity-pronoun references in Hindi. While most of the existing approaches, syntactic as well as data-driven, use phrase-structure syntax for anaphora resolution, we explore use of dependency structures as a source of syntactic information. In our approach, dependency structures are used by a rule-based module to resolve simple anaphoric refe...

Two fMRI studies investigated the time course and amplitude of brain activity in language-related areas during the processing of syntactically ambiguous sentences. In Experiment 1, higher levels of activation were found during the reading of unpreferred syntactic structures as well as more complex structures. In Experiments 2A and 2B higher levels of brain activation were found for ambiguous se...

A. Compositionality is often considered a fundamental principle of semantics for natural language. Yet only fairly recently has there been something of a theory of compositionality which allows to prove actual results. Basically, the lack of progress has been due to an improper understanding of what syntactic and semantic structures actually are. Many linguistic theories in one way or an...

Using data from a behavioral structural priming experiment, we test two competing theoretical approaches to argument structure, which attribute different configurations to (in)transitive structures. These approaches make different claims about the relationship between unergatives and transitive structures selecting either a DP complement or a small clause complement in structurally unambiguous ...

A considerable amount of study has recently been concentrated on the use of linguistically motivated unification based grammars for sentence generation (see for example Appelt 1987, Calder 1989, Shieber 1988, Shieber et al. 1989). The grammars state correspondences between semantic structures and syntactic ones. In most grammars, several syntactic structures will correspond to each semantic one...