The paper proposes a theory relating syntax, semantics, and intonational prosody, and covering a wide range of English intonational tunes and their semantic interpretation in terms of focus and information structure. The theory is based on a version of combinatory categorial grammar which directly pairs phonological and logical forms without intermediary representational levels.

We consider the structural descriptions produced by various grammatical formalisms in terms of the complexity of the paths and the relationship between paths in the sets of structural descriptions that each system can generate. In considering the relationship between formalisms, we show that it is useful to abstract away from the details of the formalism, and examln the nature of their derivation process as reflected by properties of their derivation trees. We find that several of the formalisms considered can be seen as being closely related since they have derivation ee sets with the same structure as those produced by Context-Free Grammars. On the basis of this observation, we describe a class of formalisms which we call Linear Context- Free Rewritin Systems, and show they are recognizable in polynomial time and generate only semilinear languages.

This thesis presents accounts of a range of linguistic phenomena in an extended categorial framework, and develops proposals for processing grammars set within this framework. Linguistic phenomena whose treatment we address include word order, grammatical relations and obliqueness, extraction and island constraints, and binding. The work is set within a flexible categorial framework which is a version of the Lambek calculus (Lambek, 1958) extended by the inclusion of additional type-forming operators whose logical behaviour allows for the characterization of some aspect of linguistic phenomena. We begin with the treatment of extraction phenomena and island constraints. An account is developed in which there are many interrelated notions of boundary, and where the sensitivity of any syntactic process to a particular class of boundaries can be addressed within the grammar. We next present a new categorial treatment of word order which factors apart the specification of the order of a h...

this paper. Thanks are also due to Steve Pulman, Ewan Klein, David Beaver and Guy Barry for discussion during the early stages of the work, and to other members of the University of Edinburgh Centre for Cognitive Science and the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory. The research was supported by the British Science and Engineering Research Council (Research Fellowship B/90/ITF/288, and Research Grant RR30718)

Stochastic categorial grammars (SCGs) are introduced as a more appropriate formalism for statistical language learners to estimate than stochastic context free grammars. As a vehicle for demonstrating SCG estimation, we show, in terms of crossing rates and in coverage, that when training material is limited, SCG estimation using the Minimum Description Length Principle is preferable to SCG estimation using an indifferent prior.

The almeture imposed apon spoken sentences by intonation seems frequently to be orthogonal to their Ixadifional surface-syntaetic struc- ture. However, the notion of "intonational struc- ture" as formulated by Pierrehumbert, Selkirk, and others, can tm $ubsurned under a rather dif- ferent notion of syntacti safface $ffueture that emexgem from a theory of grammar based on a "Combinatory" exttmsion to Categorial Otan max. Interptationa of constituents at this level are in mrn directly related to "inforrnat[o structure ", or discourse-related notions of "theme", 'heme", "focus" and 'reatippo$ition". Some simplifications appear to follow for the problem of integrating syntax and other high-level modules in spoken language systems.

this paper, I present work in progress on an extension of Combinatory Categorial Grammars, CCGs, (Steedman 1985) to handle languages with freer word order than English, specifically Turkish. The approach I develop takes advantage of CCGs' ability to combine the syntactic as well as the semantic representations of adjacent elements in a sentence in an incremental manner. The linguistic claim behind my approach is that free word order in Turkish is a di- rect result of its grammar and lexical categories; this approach is not compatible with a linguistic theory involving movement operations and traces

Abstract not found

In this paper, I discuss machine translation of English text into a relatively "free" word order language, specifically Turkish. I present algorithms that use contextual information to determine what the topic and the focus of each sentence should be, in order to generate the contextually appropriate word orders in the target language. Introduction Languages such as Catalan, Czech, Finnish, German, Hindi, Hungarian, Japanese, Polish, Russian, Turkish, etc. have much freer word order than English. For example, all six permutations of a transitive sentence are grammatical in Turkish (although SOV is the most common). When we translate an English text into a "free" word order language, we are faced with a choice between many different word orders that are all syntactically grammatical but are not all felicitous or contextually appropriate. In this paper, I discuss machine translation (MT) of English text into Turkish and concentrate on how to generate the appropriate word order in the t...

ABSTRACT: We demonstrate ways to enhance the coverage of a symbolic NLP system through data-intensive and machine learning techniques, while preserving the advantages of using a principled symbolic grammar formalism. We automatically acquire a large syntactic CCG lexicon from the Penn Treebank and combine it with semantic and morphological infor-mation from another hand-built lexicon using decision tree and maximum entropy classifiers. We also integrate statistical preprocessing methods in our system.