In this paper, we show how a constraint-based approach influences the modelling of preposition lexicalization in natural language generation. We concentrate on the linguistic description, which is the most challenging. The CSP procedures themselves are then rather straightforward. Preposition choice depends on the verb and its requirements, on the one hand, and the characteristics of the NP the...

This paper discusses the effects of semantic variation in the meaning of property concept (PC) terms (Dixon 1982) on the grammar of predicative and comparative constructions. We demonstrate that, in a range of unrelated and less well-studied languages in which PC terms are not adjectival, such constructions systematically surface with possessive morphology/syntax. This pattern, which we refer t...

This paper examines the status of so-called ‘pleonastic’ determiners, focusing on the plural definite generic common in Romance languages. It is noted that every language has generic or kind-denoting terms but such terms vary between bare and definite (rather than indefinite) forms across languages. Canonical and non-canonical uses of definite determiners are distinguished and language variatio...

Phrasal verbs have some structural and semantic characteristics in common with morphologically complex words, even though they originate from phrasal constructions. Focusing on the role played by lexicalization and grammaticalization processes in the gradual shift from syntactic to morphological structures, this paper deals with semantic and morphotactic characteristics of Italian phrasal verbs...

German has a productive morphology and allows the creation of complex words which are often highly ambiguous. This paper reports on the development of a head-lexicalized PCFG for the disambiguation of German morphological analyses. The grammar is trained on unlabeled data using the Inside-Outside algorithm. The parser achieves a precision of more than 68% on difficult test data, which is 23% mo...

This paper proposes a modelization of the coordination within the framework of Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG), based on concepts of functor, arguments and subcategorization requirements. It enables coordination of more than one constituent as well as of different categories. This modelization lies on a lexicalization of the coordination principle and two generalizations of the noti...

We present a new approach to stochastic modeling of constraintbased grammars that is based on loglinear models and uses EM for estimation from unannotated data. The techniques are applied to an LFG grammar for German. Evaluation on an exact match task yields 86% precision for an ambiguity rate of 5.4, and 90% precision on a subcat frame match for an ambiguity rate of 25. Experimental comparison...

In this paper, we show that by integrating existing NLP techniques and Semantic Web tools in a novel way, we can provide a valuable contribution to the solution of the knowledge acquisition bottleneck problem. NLP techniques to create a domain ontology on the basis of an open domain corpus have been combined with Semantic Web tools. More specifically, Watson and Prompt have been employed to enh...

The notion of subject in human language has a privileged status relative to other arguments. This special status is manifested in the behavior of subjects at the morphological, syntactic, semantic and discourse levels. Here we bring evidence that subjects have privileged status at the lexical level as well, by analyzing lexicalization patterns of verbs in three different sign languages. Our ana...

This paper introduces Stochastic Definite Clause Grammars, a stochastic variant of the wellknown Definite Clause Grammars. The grammar formalism supports parameter learning from annotated or unannotated corpora and provides a mechanism for parse selection by means of statistical inference. Unlike probabilistic contextfree grammars, it is a context-sensitive grammar formalism and it has the abil...