tailieunhanh - Báo cáo khoa học: "DESIGNER DEFINITES IN LOGICAL FORM"

In this paper, we represent singular definite noun phrases as functions in logical form. This representation is designed to model the behaviors of both anaphoric and non-anaphoric, distributive definites. It is also designed to obey the computational constraints suggested in Harper [Har88]. Our initial representation of a definite places an upper bound on its behavior given its structure and location in a sentence. Later, when ambiguity is resolved, the precise behavior of the definite is pinpointed. . | DESIGNER DEFINITES IN LOGICAL FORM Mary p. Harper School of Electrical Engineering Purdue University West Lafayette IN 47907 Abstract In this paper we represent singular definite noun phrases as functions in logical form. This representation is designed to model the behaviors of both anaphoric and non-anaphoric distributive definites. It is also designed to obey the computational constraints suggested in Harper Har88 . Our initial representation of a definite places an upper bound on its behavior given its structure and location in a sentence. Later when ambiguity is resolved the precise behavior of the definite is pinpointed. 1 Introduction A goal of natural language research is to provide a computer model capable of understanding English sentences. One approach to constructing this model requires the generation of an unambiguous internal representation for each sentence before attempting to represent subsequent sentences. Natural language systems that attempt to guess the intended meaning of a sentence without considering subsequent sentences usually make no provision for recovery from incorrect guesses since that would require storing information about the ambiguity of the sentence. Hence this approach may require the processing of several sentences before enough information is available to determine the intended meaning of the sentence being represented. However in order to make the inferences necessary to resolve some ambiguities some internal representation is needed for both the current sentence as well as subsequent sentences. A more powerful approach is to leave the ambiguity unresolved in an intermediate representation until the necessary information has been processed. We adopt this second approach which advocates mapping parsed sentences into an intermediate level of representation called ỉogical form This paper contains results from the author s thesis in the Computer Science Department at Brown University. The paper has benefited Hom discussions with