Conversational Grammar- Feminine Grammar? A Sociopragmatic Corpus Study

Conversational implicature: interacting with grammar

I seek to mediate this debate. I describe a general framework for interactional models of implicature and then assess the major arguments for grammar-driven approaches. My central findings are that many of these arguments are conceptually or theoretically problematic, and that the valid ones do not compromise the Gricean picture. Stepping back, I find that the two sides in this debate are not r...

Corpus-Based Grammar Specialization

Broad-coverage grammars tend to be highly ambiguous. When such grammars are used in a restricted domain, it may be desirable to specialize them, in effect trading some coverage for a reduction in ambiguity. Grammar specialization is here given a novel formulation as an optimization problem, in which the search is guided by a global measure combining coverage, ambiguity and grammar size. The met...

Grammar-based Corpus Annotation

There is an increasing number of linguists interested in large syntactically annotated corpora (treebanks). Such corpora can serve as a base for statistical applications and, at the same time, may be used in theoretical linguistics as a source for investigations about language use. The most important treebank nowadays is the Penn Treebank (Marcus et al., 1993; Marcus et al., 1994). Many statist...

Learning a Grammar from a Bracketed Corpus

A Corpus-based Probabilistic Unification Grammar

This paper describes an attempt at creating a robust parsing system for the SCHISMA task domain. We describe how a probabilistic unification grammar is generated from a corpus of utterances collected in Wizard of Oz experiments. We tagged this corpus with syntactic categories and superficial structure using Standard Generalised Markup Language (SGML). From the annotated data thus obtained a pro...