We establish for the first time a formal relationship between dominance graphs, used for modeling semantics, and grammar formalisms with underspecified dominance links, used for modeling syntax. We present a translation of normal dominance graphs into Unordered Vector Grammars with Dominance Links (UVG-DL) and prove that the configurations of the dominance graph correspond to the derivation tre...

Theories of natural language syntax often characterize grammatical knowledge as a form of abstract computation. This paper argues that such a characterization is correct, and that fundamental properties of grammar can and should be understood in terms of restrictions on the complexity of possible grammatical computation, when defined in terms of generative capacity. More specifically, the paper...

Natural Language Grammar can be viewed as a formal system in many aspects. The traditional way of presenting grammar to students as a set of morphosyntactic rules in order to speak a language correctly can be substituted profitably by formal models that explain the interfaces between morphology, syntax and semantics and even pragmatics. These models are based in most cases in logical models. Th...

Department of Computer and Information Sciences University of Pennsy!vania 200 South 33rd Street Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA { ki pper,htd,schuler,mpalmer}@linc.cis.upenn.edu We present a class-based approach to building a verb lexicon that makes explicit the close relation between syntax and semanrics for Levin classes. We have used a Lexicalized Tree Adjoining Grammar to capture the syntax as...

In Turkish, which is an agglutinative language, it is difficult to divide morphology and syntax, therefore it is reasonable to treat them in the same way. In this paper, we present morphosyntactic generation of Turkish surface forms from a structured meaning representation, predicate-argument structure (PAS). The algorithm uses a categorial framework which integrates inflectional morphology, sy...

Programmers tend to avoid using language tools, resorting to ad-hoc methods, because tools can be hard to use, their parsing strategies can be difficult to understand and debug, and their generated parsers can be opaque black-boxes. In particular, there are two very common difficulties encountered by grammar developers: Understanding why a grammar fragment results in a parser nondeterminism and...

The simultaneously phonological and syntactic grammar of second position clitics is an instance of the broader problem of applying constraints across multiple levels of linguistic analysis. Syntax frameworks extended with simple tree transductions can make efficient use of these necessary additional forms of structure. An analysis of Sahidic Coptic second position clitics in a context-free gram...

With the rapid increase of the short message service in China, the information query technology based on the Chinese natural language is becoming a research hotspot at present. An algorithm of the Chinese natural language understanding based on certain domain knowledge is proposed, and it is applied to a Chinese short message based information query system. The algorithm is divided into three i...

This paper shows that the commonly held serial view of the incorporation of overt forms in the grammar (e.g. Hayes 1996 for phonology, and Legendre, Smolensky & Wilson 1998 for syntax) is inconsistent with the even more commonly held view that if two distinct underlying forms are pronounced identically, at least one of them must violate faithfulness. By contrast, perceptual control grammars (Bo...

We provide a pipeline for generating syntax diagrams (also called railroad diagrams) from context free grammars. Syntax diagrams are a graphical representation of a context free language, which we formalize abstractly as a set of mutually recursive nondeterministic finite automata and draw by combining elements from the confluent drawing, layered drawing, and smooth orthogonal drawing styles. W...