Extreme
underspecification: using semantics to integrate deep and shallow processing
Ann Copestake
Computer Laboratory
University of Cambridge
Formal compositional semantics
is generally thought to depend on
deep
syntactic processing and on a detailed lexicon that includes
information about subcategorization. This has led to semantics
being
ignored in much recent computational linguistic work that
concentrates
on robust, broad-coverage techniques. I will argue that even very
shallow processing can be treated as manipulating logical forms,
if a
representation language is used which allows extreme
underspecification. Thinking of shallow processing in this way
allows
for the development of a general framework for integrating shallow
and
deep language processing.