Things between Lexicon and Grammar

A number of grammar formalisms were proposed in 80’s, such as Lexical Functional Grammars, Generalized Phrase Structure Grammars, and Tree Adjoining Grammars. Those formalisms then started to put a stress on lexicon, and were called as lexicalist (or lexicalized) grammars. Representative examples of lexicalist grammars were Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammars (HPSG) and Lexicalized Tree Adjoining Grammars (LTAG). While grammars and lexicons were two major linguistic resources of syntactic processing of natural languages, lexicons began to play an important role in language processing. Things have changed from early 90’s, when large scale language resources became available and corpus-based research started to dominate almost all aspects of natural language processing (NLP). Partof-speech taggers and syntactic parsers are the most well-studied topics in corpus-based research. Various parsers, based either on phrase structure grammars or on dependency structures, have been developed, applying various machine learning techniques on syntactically annotated corpora. State-ofthe-art parsers developed in this way have achieved very good performance. Those trends are also beneficial to lexicalist grammars since parsing with those grammar formalisms is amenable to phrase structure-based parsing through abstraction of grammatical schemata or a derivation process with those grammar formalism (i.e., a derivation tree) can be considered to correspond to a word dependency tree. Recent trends in NLP have started to target diversely spread areas that require semantic and pragmatic information. Some areas like social media analysis, such as twitter or blog text analysis, have a more preference to getting semantic or sentiment information than syntactic information. Though this trend is attracting people’s attention and is getting growing importance, still syntactic analysis keeps to play an important role. Simple extension of annotated corpora and lexical statistics will not be able to skyrocket parsers’ performance. Improvement of parsing accuracy especially that of long sentences requires to tackle problems that are not on the current main stream of parser development. In this talk, I will take up three issues that lie between grammars and lexicons: Coordination structures, multiword expressions and complex sentence patterns. I will first give a brief overview of syntactic processing in past two/three decades, then will talk about the issues one by one especially about our experiences related with them. Finally, I will consider future directions of sentence analysis taking those into account.