Computational Properties of Environment-based Disambiguation

The standard pipeline approach to semantic processing, in which sentences are morphologically and syntactically resolved to a single tree before they are interpreted, is a poor fit for applications such as natural language interfaces. This is because the environment information, in the form of the objects and events in the application’s runtime environment, cannot be used to inform parsing decisions unless the input sentence is semantically analyzed, but this does not occur until after parsing in the single-tree semantic architecture. This paper describes the computational properties of an alternative architecture, in which semantic analysis is performed on all possible interpretations during parsing, in polynomial time.