The files are stored in Postscript, in compressed (gzip) form, with the report number as filename. Alternatively, reports are available by post from the above address. Abstract In this report we present a workbench for natural language grammars which was designed as a computational tool to help verifying the theoretical consistency and the empirical adequacy of syntactic and semantic analysis o...

PhD Thesis written by Benjamín Ramírez González at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, under the supervision of Dr. Fernando Sánchez León (Real Academia Española, Technology Department). It was defended on February 25th, 2014 at the Instituto Universitario Ortega y Gasset, and it was awarded Summa Cum Laude. The members of the committee were José Lázaro Rodrigo (Universidad Complutense de Ma...

Computationally feasible accounts of complex linguistic phenomena (such as discontinuity, ellipsis, etc.) usually require additional, complex grammatical resources together with parsing heuristics to mitigate computational overhead. We claim that certain kinds of knowledge usually expressed as heuristics can be seen as declarative grammar knowledge if a default interpretation is given to gramma...

1 Introduction Linguistic theory presents a search space of possible grammars. Under that theory, learning a language requires navigating that search space in order to find the correct grammar (the most restrictive grammar consistent with the overt data provided to the learner). The computational difficulty of that task depends almost entirely on the formal structure of the search space. Any pl...

Treebanks, such as the Penn Treebank, provide a basis for the automatic creation of broad coverage grammars. In the simplest case, rules can simply be ‘read off’ the parse-annotations of the corpus, producing either a simple or probabilistic context-free grammar. Such grammars, however, can be very large, presenting problems for the subsequent computational costs of parsing under the grammar. I...

A simple unification-based formalism is identified, and it is demonstrated how small changes effect its computational complexity. Versions are defined for polynomial time (PTIME), non-deterministic polynomial time (NPTIME), polynomial space (PSPACE), exponential time (EXPTIME), and undecidability (UNDEC). If the grammar is unambiguous or deterministically copying, its recognition problem is sol...

Many theories of grammar and styles of grammar speciication have stemmed from mathematical logic, computer science, and computational linguistics, and have been used for describing natural languages. By a series of constructions, we relate categorial, attribute and logic grammars via (axiomatic) labelled deductive systems, and extend this relation to accommodate uniication-based grammars and so...

Diversity of language is a key part of our understanding of natural languages now and from the past. This diversity goes hand in hand with language change. Change is pervasive at every linguistic level. However, the space of existing languages does not appear to be unconstrained. In the modern generative tradition, this is governed by Universal Grammar (UG) (see, for example, Kroch (2000)). A n...

In this paper, we show how typed uniication based formalisms extended with arbitrary relations can be used to generate discourse. We start by presenting the speciic framework being used (discourse grammar), and we argue that it provides a natural setting for a computational analysis of intersentential phenomena such as ellipsis, anaphora and focus. We then show that it is possible for a discour...

Modern linguistic theory attributes surface complexity to interacting subsystems of constraints. For instance, the ID/LP grammar formalism separates constraints on immediate dominance from those on linear order. An ID/LP parsing algorithm by Shieber shows how to use ID and LP constraints directly in language processing, without expanding them into an intermediate context-free "object grammar". ...