Intelligent linguistic architectures : varations on themes by Ronald M. Kaplan

Abstract

This volume collects papers that are at the cutting edge of research in computational as well as theoretical linguistics. As all of the papers represent research areas in which Ronald M. Kaplan has made foundational contributions, the papers in the volume represent a tribute to the vital role he has played in the development of computational linguistic research and linguistic theory, particularly within Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG). Part one, “Generation and Translation,” contains contributions on the design of the most optimal architecture for machine translation, parsing and generation, as well as proposals for a machine translation system which successfully combines statistical methods with deep natural language processing. Part two, “Grammar Engineering and Applications,” focuses on practical natural language processing such as using the LFG grammar development platform XLE for implementing tutoring systems, building large lexicons and grammars, exploring interactions of tagging and parsing, and building large grammars and lexical resources from treebanks. Part three, “Formal Issues,” examines difficult linguistic data and their treatment in formal linguistic theory. These papers range from contributions on Optimality Theoretical vs. finite-state treatments of Finnish prosody to mixed-category constructions to theories of discourse and coordination. Foundational issues addressed include interactions between morphology and syntax in complex predicates, coordination and agreement, and the resolution of coordination asymmetries via f-structure analysis. Part four, “Semantics and Inference,” examines the fundamental issue of compositionality in syntactic and semantic theory, and presents cutting edge research on theoretical and practical issues in mapping from linguistic structures to knowledge representations.