In the first half of this paper, we present and evaluate EspGram a Constraint Grammar (CG) -based parser for the artificial language Esperanto. The second half of the paper describes the compilation and annotation of a corpus of 18.5 million words covering Esperanto literature, news text and web pages. As a planned language, conceived to be easy to learn and flexible to use, Esperanto has a hig...

A typical phrase-based machine translation (PBMT) system uses phrase pairs extracted from word-aligned parallel corpora. All phrase pairs that are consistent with word alignments are collected. The resulting phrase table is very large and includes many non-syntactic phrases which may not be necessary. We propose to filter the phrase table based on source language syntactic constraints. Rather t...

There are several types of ambiguity in natural languages, including lexical ambiguity, syntactic (or structural) ambiguity, quantifier scope ambiguity, and anaphora (or ambiguity of reference). Each type of ambiguity must be resolved for a natural language understanding program to be effective. Since syntax often limits the possible meanings of a sentence (and the words in the sentence), natur...

Unrestricted text analysis requires an accurate syntactic analysis but structural ambiguity is one of the most difficult problems to resolve. Researchers have tried different approaches to obtain the correct syntactic structure from analyzed sentences but not successful results have been obtained. Two different approaches have traditionally applied to syntactic analysis: constituent grammars an...

A controlled reading experiment reveals that stress-based linguistic rhythm impinges on syntactic ambiguity resolution in silent and oral reading. The results suggest that, at points of syntactic underspecification, the accruing prosodic representation may affect even the earliest stages of structure building, viz. the analysis of syntactic features of an ambiguous word. Such an effect remains ...

This paper presents a new context-free parsing algorithm based on a bidirectional strictly horizontal strategy which incorporates strong top–down predictions (derivations and adjacencies). From a functional point of view, the parser is able to propagate syntactic constraints reducing parsing ambiguity. From a computational perspective, the algorithm includes different techniques aimed at the im...

Syntactic ambiguity resolution often appears to be guided by the use of lexical constraint information (e. A traditional linguistic framework of discrete syntactic categories can complicate the modeling of such lexical constraints. There is evidence that syntactic ambiguity resolution is exposure-based, i.e. present analyses are innuenced by past experiences (e.g. Mitchell and Cuetos (1991)). A...

Syntactically ambiguous sentences have been found to be difficult to process, in particular, for individuals with low working memory capacity. The current study used fMRI to investigate the neural basis of this effect in the processing of written sentences. Participants with high and low working memory capacity read sentences with either a short or long region of temporary syntactic ambiguity w...

Ambiguity is the fundamental property of natural language. Perhaps, the most burdensome case of ambiguity manifests itself on the syntactic level of analysis. In order to face up to the high number of obtained derivation trees, this paper describes several techniques for evaluation of the figures of merit, which define a sort order on parsing trees. The presented methods are based on language s...