VIJAY-SHANKER AND WEIR

Language and Computation
EXPLOITING TREE DESCRIPTIONS IN STRONGLY LEXICALIZED GRAMMAR FORMALISMS AND PARSERS

Advanced course

K. VIJAY-SHANKER and DAVID WEIR

Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Delaware and

School of Cognitive and Computing Science, University of Sussex

Second week
vijay@cis.udel.edu and davidw@dogs.susx.ac.uk

Course description

Underspecification of trees has, until recently, either not been used to specify constraints on the well-formedness of grammars, or has been applied to theories that are not formulated in a completely precise way (see [1], [2,3], and [4,5] for exceptions to this). The potential use of tree descriptions provides insights into the formulation of various strongly lexicalized grammar formalisms including Lexicalized Tree-Adjoining Grammars and related formalisms. In this course we will show how this has led to the development of D-Tree Grammars [6] which was designed with the expressed purpose of exploiting the use of partial tree descriptions.

Underspecification has also been used in parsing [7,8,9]. Tree descriptions can be used by a parser to postpone the need to make commitments about the structure(s) being assigned to that portion of the input seen so far. We will describe various approaches to the parsing of lexicalized grammars that seek to exploit underspecified descriptions at intermediate points in the parsing process.

Prerequisites
None

Literature

Kracht, M, 1995, "Syntactic codes and Grammar Refinement", Journal of Language, Logic and Information 4:41-60.
Kempson, R, Meyer-Viol, W & Gabbay, D, forthcoming, "Syntactic computation as labelled deduction". In Borsley, R. & Roberts, I. (eds.) Syntactic Categories. Academic Press.
Blackburn, P & Meyer-Viol, W, 1994, "Linguistics, logic and finite trees" Bulletin of Interest Group in Pure and Applied Logics, Vol.2. No.1, 3-29.
Morawietz, F & Cornell, T, 1997, "Representing Constraints with Automata", in Proceedings of the ACL.
Rogers, J 1994, "Studies in the Logic of Trees with Applications to Grammar Formalisms", Ph.D. dissertation, University of Delaware.
Rambow, O, Vijay-Shanker, K & Weir, D, 1995, "D-Tree Grammars" in Proceedings of the ACL.
Marcus, Hindle & Fleck 1983, "Talking about talking about trees" in Proceedings of the ACL.
Sturt, P and Crocker, M 1996, "Monotonic Syntactic Processing: A Cross-Linguistic Study of Attachment and Reanalysis. Language and Cognitive Processes.
Gorrell, P, 1995 "Syntax and Parsing", Cambridge University Press.

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Language and Computation	EXPLOITING TREE DESCRIPTIONS IN STRONGLY LEXICALIZED GRAMMAR FORMALISMS AND PARSERS
Advanced course	K. VIJAY-SHANKER and DAVID WEIR Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Delaware and School of Cognitive and Computing Science, University of Sussex
Second week	vijay@cis.udel.edu and davidw@dogs.susx.ac.uk
Course description	Underspecification of trees has, until recently, either not been used to specify constraints on the well-formedness of grammars, or has been applied to theories that are not formulated in a completely precise way (see [1], [2,3], and [4,5] for exceptions to this). The potential use of tree descriptions provides insights into the formulation of various strongly lexicalized grammar formalisms including Lexicalized Tree-Adjoining Grammars and related formalisms. In this course we will show how this has led to the development of D-Tree Grammars [6] which was designed with the expressed purpose of exploiting the use of partial tree descriptions. Underspecification has also been used in parsing [7,8,9]. Tree descriptions can be used by a parser to postpone the need to make commitments about the structure(s) being assigned to that portion of the input seen so far. We will describe various approaches to the parsing of lexicalized grammars that seek to exploit underspecified descriptions at intermediate points in the parsing process.
Prerequisites	None
Literature	Kracht, M, 1995, "Syntactic codes and Grammar Refinement", Journal of Language, Logic and Information 4:41-60. Kempson, R, Meyer-Viol, W & Gabbay, D, forthcoming, "Syntactic computation as labelled deduction". In Borsley, R. & Roberts, I. (eds.) Syntactic Categories. Academic Press. Blackburn, P & Meyer-Viol, W, 1994, "Linguistics, logic and finite trees" Bulletin of Interest Group in Pure and Applied Logics, Vol.2. No.1, 3-29. Morawietz, F & Cornell, T, 1997, "Representing Constraints with Automata", in Proceedings of the ACL. Rogers, J 1994, "Studies in the Logic of Trees with Applications to Grammar Formalisms", Ph.D. dissertation, University of Delaware. Rambow, O, Vijay-Shanker, K & Weir, D, 1995, "D-Tree Grammars" in Proceedings of the ACL. Marcus, Hindle & Fleck 1983, "Talking about talking about trees" in Proceedings of the ACL. Sturt, P and Crocker, M 1996, "Monotonic Syntactic Processing: A Cross-Linguistic Study of Attachment and Reanalysis. Language and Cognitive Processes. Gorrell, P, 1995 "Syntax and Parsing", Cambridge University Press.