In this chapter we explore the possibility that within Optimality Theory, a single syntactic grammar directly yields not only competence theoretic results on the grammatical distributions of elements, but also performance theoretic results on relative preferences when processing sentences with various syntactic ambiguities. Whereas the competence theory applies the grammar at the level of an en...

Many of the errors produced by up-to-date POS-taggers could be considered as morphologic, syntactic or semantic. Once statistical tagging does not deal with semantic ambiguity, the correction of (morpho)syntactic errors emerges as one of the possibilities to improve the accuracy of this task. This work describes a method that applies a robust parser with correction rules over a POS-tagging outp...

Evidence has been mixed on whether speakers spontaneously and reliably produce prosodic cues that resolve syntactic ambiguities. And when speakers do produce such cues, it is unclear whether they do so "for" their addressees (the audience design hypothesis) or "for" themselves, as a by-product of planning and articulating utterances. Three experiments addressed these issues. In Experiments 1 an...

A hybrid method to Chinese-English machine translation is presented, a rule-based analysis is combined with statistical data. The rule-based lexical analyzer and syntactic analyzer leave some amount of ambiguity that are resolved using statistical approach. Hidden Markov Model(HMM) is used to return a score for each parts of speech, improved probabilistic context free grammar(PCFG) is used for ...

The Constraint Grammar of Estonian presented in the paper is the first attempt in automatic syntactic analysis of Estonian. The grammar consists of 1,240 morphological disambiguation rules, 47 clause boundary detection rules, 180 morphosyntactic mapping rules and 1,118 syntactic constraints. The rules have been devised using a training corpus of 20,300 words and have been tested on a benchmark ...

Listeners resolve ambiguity in speech by consulting context. Extensive research on this issue has largely relied on continua of sounds constructed to vary incrementally between two phonemic endpoints. In this study we presented listeners instead with phonetic ambiguity of a kind with which they have natural experience: varying degrees of word-final /t/-reduction. In two experiments, Dutch liste...

Eye-movement research on implicit prosody has found effects of lexical stress on syntactic ambiguity resolution, suggesting that metrical well-formedness constraints interact with syntactic category assignment. Building on these findings, the present eyetracking study investigates whether contextual bias can modulate the effects of metrical structure on syntactic ambiguity resolution in silent ...

Two eye movement experiments examined effects on syntactic reanalysis when the correct analysis was briefly entertained at an earlier point in the sentence. In Experiment 1, participants read sentences containing a noun phrase coordination/clausal coordination ambiguity, while in Experiment 2 they read sentences containing a subordinate clause object/main clause subject ambiguity. The critical ...

A neurocomputational model based on emergent massively overlapping neural cell assemblies (CAs) for resolving prepositional phrase (PP) attachment ambiguity is described. PP attachment ambiguity is a well-studied task in natural language processing and is a case where semantics is used to determine the syntactic structure. A large network of biologically plausible fatiguing leaky integrate-and-...

In order to comprehend speech, listeners have to combine low-level phonetic information about the incoming auditory signal with higher-order contextual information to make a lexical selection. This requires stable phonological categories and unambiguous representations of words in the mental lexicon. Unlike native speakers, second language (L2) speakers, who perceive nonnative sounds through th...