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.

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