Showing papers by "Cristiano Castelfranchi published in 1983"

WEDNESDAY: parsing flexible word order languages

Abstract: A parser for "flexible" word order languages must be substantially data driven. In our view syntax has two distinct roles in this connection: (1) to give impulses for assembling cognitive representations, (ii) to structure the space of search for fillers. WEDNESDAY is an interpreter for a language describing the lexicon and operating on natural language sentences. The system operates from left to right, interpreting the various words comprising the sentence one at a time. The basic ideas of the approach are the following:a) to introduce into the lexicon linguistic knowledge that in other systems is in a centralized module. The lexicon therefore carries not only morphological data and semantic descriptions. Also syntactic knowledge is distributed throughout it, partly of a procedural kind.b) to build progressively a cognitive representation of the sentence in the form of a semantic network, in a global space, accessible from all levels of the analysis.c) to introduce procedures invoked by the words themselves for syntactic memory management. Simply stated, these procedures decide on the opening, closing, and mantaining of search spaces; they use detailed constraints and take into account the active expectations.WEDNESDAY is implemented in MAGMA-LISP and with a stress on the non-deterministic mechanism.