tailieunhanh - Báo cáo khoa học: "Higher-Order Coloured Unification and Natural Language Semantics"

In this paper, we show that Higher-Order Coloured Unification - a form of unification developed for automated theorem proving - provides a general theory for modeling the interface between the interpretation process and other sources of linguistic, non semantic information. In particular, it provides the general theory for the Primary Occurrence Restriction which (Dalrymple et al., 1991)'s analysis called for. | Higher-Order Coloured Unification and Natural Language Semantics Claire Gardent Computational Linguistics Universitãt des Saarlandes D-Saarbrucken Michael Kohlhase Computer Science Universităt des Saarlandes D-Saarbriicken Abstract In this paper we show that Higher-Order Coloured Unification - a form of unification developed for automated theorem proving - provides a general theory for modeling the interface between the interpretation process and other sources of linguistic non semantic information. In particular it provides the general theory for the Primary Occurrence Restriction which Dalrymple et al. 1991 s analysis called for. 1 Introduction It is well known that Higher-Order Unification HOU can be used to construct the semantics of Natural Language Dalrymple et al. 1991 - henceforth DSP - show that it allows a treatment of VP-Ellipsis which successfully captures the interaction of VPE with quantification and nominal anaphora Pulman 1995 Gardent and Kohlhase 1996 use HOU to model the interpretation of focus and its interaction with focus sensitive operators adverbial quantifiers and second occurrence expressions Gar-dent et al. 1996 shows that HOU yields a simple but precise treatment of corrections Finally Pinkal 1995 uses linear HOU to reconstruct underspecified semantic representations. However it is also well known that the HOU approach to NL semantics systematically overgenerates and that some general theory of the interface between the interpretation process and other sources of linguistic information is needed in order to avoid this. In their treatment of VP-ellipsis DSP introduce an informal restriction to avoid over-generation the Primary Occurrence Restriction POR . Although this restriction is intuitive and linguistically well-motivated it does not provide a general theoretical framework for extra-semantic constraints. In this paper we argue that Higher-Order Coloured Unification HOCU cf. sections 3 6 a .