Conjunctions And Modularity In Language Analysis Procedures

The further enrichment of natural language systems depends in part on finding ways of "factoring" the effects of various linguistic phenomena, so that these systems can be partitioned into modules of comprehensible size and structure. Coordinate conjunction has a substantial impact on all aspects of syntactic analysis -constituent structure, grammatical constraints, and transformations. If the rules of syntactic analysis were directly expanded to accomodate conjunction, their size would increase severalfold. We describe below the mechanisms we have used to localize the effect of conjunction in our natural language analyzer, so that most of the rules of our grammar need not explicitly take conjunction into account.