Most L2 learners cannot process a second language as native speakers do because of their less automatic syntactic processing ability. In this article, the author reports two experiments that used a word-by-word self-paced reading task to examine how Japanese language learners of English process English prepositional phrases. The study also examined whether these learners could improve their syn...

This paper presents an account of how literal and metaphoric readings of spatial prepositions in so-called “Boolean Phrases” can arise. The account aims to explain how metaphoric and literal readings can interact, when two (spatial) prepositional phrases are the arguments of one phrase headed by Boolean connectives and and or (e.g. in front of the car and over his problems). It is shown that th...

While phrase-based statistical machine translation systems currently deliver state-of-theart performance, they remain weak on word order changes. Current phrase reordering models can properly handle swaps between adjacent phrases, but they typically lack the ability to perform the kind of long-distance reorderings possible with syntax-based systems. In this paper, we present a novel hierarchica...

Any computer system for natural language processing has to struggle with the problem of ambiguities. If the system is meant to extract precise information from a text, these ambiguities must be resolved. One of the most frequent ambiguities arises from the attachment of prepositional phrases (PPs). A PP that follows a noun can be attached to the noun or to the verb. In this book we propose a me...

In addressing a verb bias in syntactic analysis we present the beginnings of a noun-driven analysis paradigm. Such a paradigm may complement and compensate for some weaknesses in the existing verb-driven paradigm (in which the noun is subordinated) as applied to information sources or contexts in which the data is structured in objects and more than in events. The Current Paradigm In analysis o...