This study aims at investigating whether Persian native speakers highly advanced in English as a second language (L2ers) can switch to optimal processing strategies in the languages they know and whether working memory capacity (WMC) plays a role in this respect. To this end, using a self-paced reading task, we examined the processing strategies 62 Persian speaking proficient L2ers used to read...

the present study attempts to investigate parsing preferences (early vs. late closure) of native and l2 learners of both english and persian when they read ambiguous relative clauses. the purpose is to find out if l2 learners process l2 linguistic input in the way monolingual speakers of that language do. the participants took tests including 10 test sentences plus 10 distractors, each followed...

This paper describes a method for planning with rich qualitative, temporally extended preferences (QTEPs) using lookahead heuristics inspired by those employed in state-of-the-art classical planners. Key to our approach is a transformation of the planning domain into an equivalent but simplified planning domain. First, compound preference formulae are transformed into simpler, equivalent prefer...

It is argued that syntactic preference principles such as Right Association and Minimal Attachment are unsatisfactory as usually formulated. Among the difficulties are: (I) dependence on ill-specified or implausible principles of parser operation; (2) dependence on questionable assumptions about syntax; (3) lack Of provision, even in principle, for integration with semantic and pragmatic prefer...

In this paper, we present a novel approach which incorporates the web-derived selectional preferences to improve statistical dependency parsing. Conventional selectional preference learning methods have usually focused on word-to-class relations, e.g., a verb selects as its subject a given nominal class. This paper extends previous work to wordto-word selectional preferences by using webscale d...

Natural language understanding programs get bogged down by the multiplicity of possible syntactic structures while processing real world texts that human understanders do not have much difficulty with. In this work, I analyze the relationships between parsing strategies, the degree of local ambiguity encountered by them, and semantic feedback to syntax, and propose a parsing algorithm called He...

We implemented in our parser four parsing strategies that obey LFG grammaticality conditions and follow the hypothesis that knowledge of language is used in a “modular“ fashion. The parsing strategies are the following: Minimal Attachment (MA), Functional Preference (FP), Semantic Evaluation (SE), Referential Individuation (RI). From the way in which we experimented with them in our implementat...