In this paper we will give a formal description of the parsing model, under development at SOAS and King's College, that underlies the treatment of Long distance Dependencies, Topic and Focus, Ellipsis and Quantification in, amongst others, the papers [2],[3],[4],[5]. Although the intuition behind the model is quite natural it seems, nevertheless, not to have been explored to any extent. The main idea is to view the natural language string as consisting of a sequence of `instructions packages' to construct some term in a formal representation language, this term being the supposed interpretation, logical form of the string in question. Parsing, then, is the process of executing these packages in a left to right order. At all intermediate steps in the parse process, one will have a possibly incomplete specification of (some part of) a logical form. Incompleteness may arise in various ways: one may have a completed term which is a subterm of a logical form yet to be finished, one may have some subterm but not know yet how it is to fit within the term currently under construction, one may have an incomplete specification for a subterm with an accompanying constraint on its completion, and so on. In this talk we will give a formal introduction to the concepts of partiality and information growth required from a perspective which views parsing as left-to-right construction of logica forms.
References
[1] P. Blackburn & W. Meyer Viol 1994, Linguistics, logic and finite trees,
Bulletin of IGPL.
[2] Kempson, R., W Meyer Viol and D. Gabbay: Language Understanding:
a Procedural Perspective, in C. Retore (ed.), Logical Aspects of
Computational Linguistics, First International Conference, LACL 1996,228-247.
Lecture Notes in Computer Science Vol 1328, Springer Verlag.
[3] Meyer Viol, W., R. Kibble, R. Kempson and D. Gabbay (1997)
`Indefinites as Epsilon Terms: A Labelled Deduction Account,'
in H. Bunt and R. Muskens (eds.) Computing Meaning: Current
Issues in Computational Semantics. Kluwer Academic
Publishers. Dordrecht and Boston.
[4] Kempson, R., W Meyer Viol and D. Gabbay, VP-ellipsis: towards a
dynamic structural account. In S. Lappin, E. Benmamoun,
Fragments: studies in ellipsis and gapping, OUP, (forthcoming).
[5] Kempson, R., and Meyer Viol, W., Topic and Focus Structures:
the Dynamics of Tree Growth, in Proceedings of the 4th Formal Grammar Conference,
Saarbruecken, 1998.