Lexica play an important role in every linguistic discipline. We are confronted with many types of lexica. Depending on the type of lexicon and the language we are currently faced with a large variety of structures from very simple tables to complex graphs, as was indicated by a recent overview of structures found in dictionaries from field linguistics and language engineering. It is important ...

This paper describes Pro3Gres, a fast, robust, broad-coverage parser that delivers deep-linguistic grammatical relation structures as output, which are closer to predicate-argument structures and more informative than pure constituency structures. The parser stays as shallow as is possible for each task, combining shallow and deep-linguistic methods by integrating chunking and by expressing the...

Weighted finite-state acceptors and transducers (Pereira and Riley, 1997) are a critical technology for NLP and speech systems. They flexibly capture many kinds of stateful left-toright substitution, simple transducers can be composed into more complex ones, and they are EMtrainable. They are unable to handle long-range syntactic movement, but tree acceptors and transducers address this weaknes...

The paper deals with the rigorous methods used in the research of concepts representing abstract notions like “friendship”, “love”, “hatred”, “conscience”, and “envy”. Concepts of that kind have no visible physical support in the material world except for the sound forms of the words representing them, thus causing additional difficulties in classification, research and analysis as well as stip...

The Natural Language Understanding Engine Test Environment (ETE) is a GUI software tool that aids in the development and maintenance of large, modular, natural language understanding (NLU) systems. Natural language understanding systems are composed of modules (such as partof-speech taggers, parsers and semantic analyzers) which are difficult to test individually because of the complexity of th...

This book – written in collaboration with René Doursat, director of the Complex Systems Institute, Paris – adds a new dimension to Cognitive Grammars. It provides a rigorous, operational mathematical foundation, which draws from topology, geometry and dynamical systems to model iconic «image-schemas» and «conceptual archetypes». It defends the thesis that René Thom’s morphodynamics is especiall...

Syntactic trees, or phrase markers, have originally been suggested as a representation of syntax in the mind based on purely linguistic grounds. In this paper, the psychological reality of syntactic trees and hierarchical ordering is explored from another perspective--that of the neuropsychology of language breakdown. The study reported here examined several syntactic domains that rely on diffe...