|
Authors: Philippe Blache and Jean-Philippe Prost
[2004].
In: H. Christiansen, P. Skadhauge and J. Villadsen (Ed.),
Proceedings of the 2nd Int'l Workshop on
Constraint Solving and Language Processing (CSLP 2004),
Copenhagen, Denmark, September 2004.
[ PDF ]
Introduction:
One important question to be addressed by modern linguistics concerns
the variability of linguistic constructions. Some of them are very regular,
some others quite rare. Some are easy to explain, some others hard. And finally,
some are canonical whereas some others are less grammatical. These different aspects
have been addressed, usually separately, from a psycholinguistic perspective.
Some elements of explanation are given in terms of sentence complexity
and gradience (see for example [Gibson00], [Sorace04]). It is necessary to explain
why some utterances can be interpretable more easily than some others, or
why some are less acceptable than others.
Several linguistic theories address explicitly such questions, in particular from
the perspective of dealing with ill-formed inputs. Some elements of answer can
be found for example in the optimality theory (see [Prince93]), in the model-theoretic
syntax approach (see [Pullum03]) or in construction grammar (see
[Fillmore98], [Goldberg95]). One of the main challenges in these approaches, is
the characterization of gradience in linguistic data. The basic idea consists in hierarchizing
the linguistic information according to some "importance" criterion.
However, such importance is difficult to define. In some approaches such as probabilistic
grammars, it relies on frequency information (see [Keller03]): each rule
is weighted according to its frequency acquired on treebanks. The syntactic constructions
are specified according to the weights of the different rules. In some
other approaches, explored in this paper, the idea is to propose some objective
information relying on a symbolic representation.
This paper argues in favor of a fully constraint-based approach representing all
kind of information by means of constraints. Such an approach makes it possible
to quantify the information and proposes an ordering relation among the different
utterances relying on the interpretation of satis.ed and violated constraints.
References:
[Blache01]
Blache P. & J-M. Balfourier (2001). Property Grammars: a Flexible Constraint-
Based Approach to Parsing, in proceedings of IWPT-2001.
[Blache00] Blache P. (2000). Constraints, Linguistic Theories and Natural Language Processing, in Natural Language Processing, D. Christodoulakis (ed), Lecture Notes in Artificial
Intelligence 1835, Springer-Verlag
[Croft03] Croft W. & D. Cruse (2003) Cognitive Linguistics, Cambridge University Press.
[Fillmore98] Fillmore C. (1998) Inversion and Contructional Inheritance, in Lexical and Constructional
Aspects of Linguistic Explanation, Stanford University.
[Gibson00] Gibson T. (2000) Dependency locality theory: a distance-based theory of linguistic
complexity, in Marantz & al. (eds), Image, Language and Brain , MIT Press.
[Goldberg95] Goldberg A. (1995) Constructions: A Construction Grammar Approach to Argument
Structure, Chicago University Press.
[Kay99] Kay P. & C. Fillmore (1999) Grammatical Constructions and Linguistic Generalizations:
the What's x Doing y? construction, Language.
[Keller03] Keller F. (2003) A probabilistic Parser as a Model of Global Processing Difficulty,
in proceedings of ACCSS-03
[Langacker99] Langacker R. (1999), Grammar and Conceptualization, Walter de Gruyter.
[Mertens93] Mertens P. (1993) Accentuation, intonation et morphosyntaxe, in Travaux de Linguistique
26
[Pollard94] Pollard C. & I. Sag (1994), Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammars, CSLI,
Chicago University Press.
[Prince93] Prince A. & Smolensky P. (1993), Optimality Theory: Constraint Interaction in Generative
Grammars, Technical Report RUCCS TR-2, Rutgers Center for Cognitive Science.
[Pullum03] Pullum G. & B. Scholz (2003), Model-Theoretic Syntax Foundations - Linguistic
Aspects, ESSLLI lecture notes, Vienna University of Technology.
[Sag99] Sag I. & T. Wasow (1999), Syntactic Theory. A Formal Introduction, CSLI.
[Sorace04] Sorace A. & F. Keller (2004), Gradience in Linguistic Data, to appear, Lingua.
[Vasishth03] Vasishth S. (2003) Quantifying Processing Difficulty in Human Sentence Parsing, in procedings of Eurocogsci-2003
BibTeX source:
@INPROCEEDINGS{Blache2004a,
author = {Philippe Blache and Jean-Philippe Prost},
title = {{G}radience, {C}onstructions and {C}onstraint {S}ystems},
booktitle = {CSLP-04, Proceedings of the First Workshop on Constraint Solving
and Language Processing},
year = {2004},
editor = {Henning Christiansen and Peter Rossen Skadhauge and J{\o}rgen Villadsen},
pages = {18--28},
address = {Roskilde University, Denmark},
month = {1-3 September},
timestamp = {2006.08.19},
url = {http://www.ics.mq.edu.au/~jpprost/publis/blacheProst04-Density.pdf}
}
|