Research on Language and Computation 

About: Research on Language and Computation is an academic journal. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Computational linguistics & Parsing. It has an ISSN identifier of 1570-7075. Over the lifetime, 124 publications have been published receiving 4086 citations.

Minimal Recursion Semantics An Introduction

Abstract: Minimal recursion semantics (MRS) is a framework for computational semantics that is suitable for parsing and generation and that can be implemented in typed feature structure formalisms. We discuss why, in general, a semantic representation with minimal structure is desirable and illustrate how a descriptively adequate representation with a nonrecursive structure may be achieved. MRS enables a simple formulation of the grammatical constraints on lexical and phrasal semantics, including the principles of semantic composition. We have integrated MRS with a broad-coverage HPSG grammar.

Syntactic Simplification and Text Cohesion

Abstract: Syntactic simplification is the process of reducing the grammatical complexity of a text, while retaining its information content and meaning. The aim of syntactic simplification is to make text easier to comprehend for human readers, or process by programs. In this paper, we formalise the interactions that take place between syntax and discourse during the simplification process. This is important because the usefulness of syntactic simplification in making a text accessible to a wider audience can be undermined if the rewritten text lacks cohesion. We describe how various generation issues like sentence ordering, cue-word selection, referring-expression generation, determiner choice and pronominal use can be resolved so as to preserve conjunctive and anaphoric cohesive relations during syntactic simplification and present the results of an evaluation of our syntactic simplification system.

Alignment as the Basis for Successful Communication

Abstract: Pickering and Garrod (2004) argued that alignment is the basis of successful communication in dialogue. In other words, successful communication goes hand-in-hand with the development of similar representations in the interlocutors. But what exactly does this mean? In this paper, we attempt to define alignment, contrasting alignment of situa- tion models with alignment of linguistic representations. We then speculate on how these notions are related and why they lead to conversational success.

TIGER: Linguistic Interpretation of a German Corpus

Abstract: This paper reports on the TIGER Treebank, a corpus of currently 40,000 syntactically annotated German newspaper sentences. We describe what kind of information is encoded in the treebank and introduce the different representation formats that are used for the annotation and exploitation of the treebank. We explain the different methods used for the annotation: interactive annotation, using the tool ANNOTATE, and LFG parsing. Furthermore, we give an account of the annotation scheme used for the TIGER treebank. This scheme is an extended and improved version of the NEGRA annotation scheme and we illustrate in detail the linguistic extensions that were made concerning the annotation in the TIGER project. The main differences are concerned with coordination, verb-subcategorization, expletives as well as proper nouns. In addition, the paper also presents the query tool TIGERSearch that was developed in the project to exploit the treebank in an adequate way. We describe the query language which was designed to facilitate a simple formulation of complex queries; furthermore, we shortly introduce TIGER in, a graphical user interface for query input. The paper concludes with a summary and some directions for future work.

LinGO Redwoods: A Rich and Dynamic Treebank for HPSG

Abstract: The LinGO Redwoods initiative is a seed activity in the design and development of a new type of treebank. A treebank is a (typically hand-built) collection of natural language utterances and associated linguistic analyses; typical treebanks—as for example the widely recognized Penn Treebank (Marcus, Santorini, & Marcinkiewicz, 1993), the Prague Dependency Treebank (Hajic, 1998), or the German TiGer Corpus (Skut, Krenn, Brants, & Uszkoreit, 1997)—assign syntactic phrase structure or tectogrammatical dependency trees over sentences taken from a naturallyoccuring source, often newspaper text. Applications of existing treebanks fall into two broad categories: (i) use of an annotated corpus in empirical linguistics as a source of structured language data and distributional patterns and (ii) use of the treebank for the acquisition (e.g. using stochastic or machine learning approaches) and evaluation of parsing systems. While several mediumto large-scale treebanks exist for English (and some for other major languages), all pre-existing publicly available resources exhibit the following limitations: (i) the depth of linguistic information recorded in these treebanks is comparatively shallow, (ii) the design and format of linguistic representation in the treebank hard-wires a small, predefined range of ways in which information can be extracted from the treebank, and (iii) representations in existing treebanks are static and over the (often yearor decade-long) evolution of a large-scale treebank tend to fall behind theoretical advances in formal linguistics and grammatical representation. LinGO Redwoods aims at the development of a novel treebanking methodology, (i) rich in nature and dynamic in both (ii) the ways linguistic data can be retrieved from the treebank in varying granularity and (iii) the constant evolution and regular updating of the treebank itself, synchronized to the development of ideas in syntactic theory. Starting in October 2001, the project is aiming to build the foundations for this new type of treebank, develop a basic set of tools required for treebank construction and maintenance, and construct an initial set of 10,000 annotated trees to be distributed together with the tools under an open-source license. Building a largescale treebank, disseminating it, and positioning the corpus as a widely-accepted resource is a multi-year effort; the results of this seeding activity will serve as a proof of concept for the novel approach that is expected to enable the LinGO group at CSLI both to disseminate the approach to the wider academic and industrial audience and to secure appropriate funding for the realization and exploitation of a larger treebank. The purpose of publication at this early stage is three-fold: (i) to encourage feedback on the Redwoods approach from a broader academic audience, (ii) to facilitate exchange with related work at other sites, and (iii) to invite additional collaborators to contribute to the construction of the Redwoods treebank or start its exploitation as early-access versions become available. This paper is an updated version of an earlier project report published by Oepen, Callahan, Flickinger, and Manning (2002); changes over that version include more recent numbers on the current Redwoods development status, inclusion of an example of discriminator-based disambiguation, and minor adaptations and corrections in various parts of the discussion.