tailieunhanh - Báo cáo khoa học: "GETTING IDIOMS INTO A LEXICON BASED PARSERS HEAD"

A n account is given of flexible idiom processing within a lexicon based parser. The view is a compositional one. The parser's behaviour is basically the "literal" one, unless a certain threshold is crossed by the weight of a particular idiom. A new process will then be added. The parser, besides yielding all idiomatic and literal interpretations embodies s o m e claims of h u m a n processing simulation. | GETTING IDIOMS INTO A LEXICON BASED PARSER S HEAD Oliviero Stock . - Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche Via del Monti Tiburtini 509 00157 Roma Italy ABSTRACT An account is given of flexible idiom processing within a lexicon based parser. The view is a compositional one. The parser s behaviour is basically the literal one unless a certain threshold is crossed by the weight of a particular idiom. A new process will then be added. The parser besides yielding all idiomatic and literal interpretations embodies some claims of human processing simulation. 1. Motivation and comparison with other approaches Idioms are a pervasive phenomenon in natural languages. For instance the first page of this paper even if written by a non-native speaker includes no less than half dozen of them. Linguists have proposed different accounts for idioms which are derived from two basic points of view one point of view considers idioms as the basic units of language with holistic characteristics perhaps including words as a particular case the other point of view emphasizes instead the fact that idioms are made up of normal parts of speech that play a precise role in the complete idiom. An explicit statement within this approach is the Principle of Decompositionality Wasow Sag and Nunberg 1982 When an expression admits analysis as morphologically or syntactically complex assume as an operating hypothesis that the sense of the expression arises from the composition of the senses of its constituent parts . The syntactic consequence is that idioms are not a different thing from normal forms. Our view is of the latter kind. We are aware of the fact that the flexibility of an idiom depends on how recognizable its metaphorical origin is. Within flexible word order languages the flexibility of idioms seems to be even more closely linked to the strengths of particular syntactic constructions. Let us now briefly discuss some computational approaches to idiom understanding. Applied computational .