The paper presents an approach for constructing a weighted bilingual dictionary of inflectional forms using as input data a traditional bilingual dictionary, and not parallel corpora. An algorithm is developed that generates all possible morphological (inflectional) forms and weights them using information on distribution of corresponding grammar sets (grammar information) in large corpora for ...

Triggers for parameter setting may be ambiguous. Strategies for dealing with ambiguity include guessing, parallel processing, and waiting for unambiguous input. The Trigger Learning Algorithm of Gibson and Wexler (1994) is a guessing system. Gibson and Wexler show that under some reasonable assumptions it may never attain the target grammar. I propose instead a deterministic device that waits f...

We introduce the new grammar formalism of Extensible Dependency Grammar (XDG), enabling us to take the different dimensions of linguistic description more seriously than existing grammar formalisms. XDG treats the different linguistic dimensions as separate, autonomous dependency graphs. We show how this allows us to naturally account for taxing phenomena such as free word order, control, and q...

Ambiguities arising from alternations of scope in interpretations for multiply quantified sentences appear to require grammatical operations that compromise the strong assumptions of syntactic/semantic transparency and monotonicity underlying the Frege-Montague approach to the theory of grammar. Examples that have been proposed include covert movement at the level of logical form, abstraction o...

Unification grammars (UG) are a grammatical formalism that underlies several contemporary linguistic theories, including Lexical-functional Grammar and Head-driven Phrase-structure Grammar. UG is an especially attractive formalism because of its expressivity, which facilitates the expression of complex linguistic structures and relations. Formally, UG is Turing-complete, generating the entire c...

Given a square image with number of rows and columns a power of two, we obtain an image sequence by continued downsampling by a factor of two until only a single pixel remains. We use each downsampled image as context for lossless coding of the next image in the sequence. The image coder makes use of a grammar called the conditional quadrisection grammar for building the next image given the co...

This paper concerns grammatical phenomena sensitive to certain classes of nominal forms, i.e. those that encode different kinds of referential properties of the nominal. We propose a grammar component for defining and picking out such semantic classes of nominal forms within typed feature structure formalisms such as the one used in HPSG, thus aiming at standardizing the representation of such ...

This paper represents categorial grammar as an implicational type theory in the spirit of Girard's linear logic, and illustrates linguistic applications of a range of type-constructors over and above implication. The type theoretic perspective is concerned with a correspondence between the logic of types, and computational operations over the objects inhabiting types. In linguistic applications...

This paper introduces Boas, a semi-automatic knowledge elicitation system that guides a team of two people through the process of developing the static knowledge sources for a moderate-quality, broad-coverage MT system from any "low-density" language into English in about six months. The paper focuses on some issues in the elicitation of descriptive knowledge in Boas and also the issue of the p...

Universal Grammar (UG) is a suspect concept. There is little agreement on what exactly is in it; and the empirical evidence for it is very weak. This paper critically examines a variety of arguments that have been put forward as evidence for UG, focussing on the three most powerful ones: universality (all human languages share a number of properties), convergence (all language learners converge...