Incremental Natural Language Understanding with Combinatory Categorial Grammar

This thesis presents a model of incremental natural language understanding based on the grammatical formalism known as Combinatory Categorial Grammar. The model constitutes an integrated system involving a cyclical process of parsing, semantic adjudication and filtering. The motivating data for the model are the well-known observations about garden path effects in human sentence processing, and particularly the fact that the presence and strength of the garden path effect is influenced by the referential context in which the sentence is uttered, as well as the actual lexical items selected. It is argued that the model successfully explains certain garden path phenomena in English. The model has been implemented in the Java programming language.