Computational Linguistics Colloquium

Tuesday, 16 December, 16:15
Aquarium Room, Building C7 4

Incrementality, Bi-directionality and Constraint-Based Grammar

Yo Sato
King's College and Queen Mary College, University of London

In this talk I will explore the possibility of a grammar which is couched in a constraint-based framework (in particular, HPSG), but can nevertheless be employed for incremental (left-to-right, word-by-word) processing. The sensitivity to incrementality in grammars will have, in addition to the familiar advantage of offering fuller representations for incomplete utterances, another benefit: bi-directional processability, i.e. applicability to both parsing and generation. I will first illustrate how this is the case, by relating incrementality with bi-directionality by means of the psycholinguistic notions of predictivity and connectedness. I will then show that, contrary to the common belief, it is possible to encode predictivity in a feature-based architecture, by `bi-directionalise' selectional capacities, that is, endowing such a capacity not only to lexical heads but also to phrases (arguments). I will finally discuss the advantages and the potential complexity implications of such a grammar.

If you would like to meet with the speaker, please contact Yi Zhang.