Beam search strategy for IPS Evaluation of structure-based heuristics

One needs to determine rst what is a natural preferred analysis. On the one hand, a selective ranking of alternatives seems to be the correct choice. Observationally, we remark that people impose rather strong restrictions on the preferred analyses they assign to an ambiguous sentence, which is often not even perceived as ambiguous. In some cases, speakers do not realize that a sentence is ambiguous and give it an incorrect interpretation. In some cases, speakers realize they have made a mistake only later on in the sentence or in the conversation. In these cases { the so called garden paths { it has been shown to be very di cult to recover the correct interpretation for the sentence (Bever 1970; Frazier 1978; Frazier and Rayner 1982; Mitchell 1987). Computationally, a program that returns all analyses, although certainly complete, is not satisfactory in practice as it would produce a considerable amount of irrelevant analyses.