This paper discusses SYNTAGMA, a rule based NLP system addressing the tricky issues of syntactic ambiguity reduction and word sense disambiguation as well as providing innovative and original solutions for constituent generation and constraints management. To provide an insight into how it operates, the system's general architecture and components, as well as its lexical, syntactic and semantic...

Data ow analysis algorithms for imperative programming languages can be split into two groups: rst, into the semantic algorithms that determine semantic equivalence between terms, and second, into the syntactic algorithms that compute complex program properties based on syntactic term identity, which support powerful optimization techniques like for example partial redundancy elimination. Value...

We describe the early stage of our methodology of knowledge acquisition from technical texts. First, a partial morpho-syntactic analysis is performed to extract "candi-date terms". Then, the knowledge engineer , assisted by an automatic clustering tool, builds the "conceptual fields" of the domain. We focus on this conceptual analysis stage, describe the data prepared from the results of the mo...

This paper seeks to account for the argument-function mismatches observed in Mandarin resultative compound verbs. The account is formulated within a revised Lexical Mapping Theory which incorporates a unified mapping principle. Under the simplest and also the strictest interpretation of this mapping principle (or the θ-criterion), a composite role, formed by two composing roles, receives syntac...

Although several theories of online syntactic processing assume the parallel activation of multiple syntactic representations, evidence supporting simultaneous activation has been inconclusive. Here, the continuous and non-ballistic properties of computer mouse movements are exploited, by recording their streaming x, y coordinates to procure evidence regarding parallel versus serial processing....

Thematic knowledge is a basis of semamic interpretation. In this paper, we propose an acquisition method to acquire thematic knowledge by exploiting syntactic clues from training sentences. The syntactic clues, which may be easily collected by most existing syntactic processors, reduce the hypothesis space of the thematic roles. The ambiguities may be further resolved by the evidences either fr...

The semantic interpretation of adverbs such as only, also, and even has been a central issue of alternative semantics for focus (Rooth 1985, 1996). Some focus adverbs, including only in English, set a limit to the range of alternative sets by their syntactic position and / or prosodic patterns. In the following example, the syntactic position of only affects the range of alternative sets (as in...

We present a new, sizeable dataset of noun– noun compounds with their syntactic analysis (bracketing) and semantic relations. Derived from several established linguistic resources, such as the Penn Treebank, our dataset enables experimenting with new approaches towards a holistic analysis of noun–noun compounds, such as jointlearning of noun–noun compounds bracketing and interpretation, as well...

We present an approach to building a verb lexicon compatible with WordNet but with explicitly stated syntactic and semantic information, using Levin verb classes to systematically construct lexical entries. By using verb classes we capture generalizations about verb behavior and reduce the effort needed to construct the lexicon. The syntactic frames for the verb classes are represented by a Lex...

This paper presents a corpus-based method for extracting semantic relations between words. The method is based on two sequential procedures. First, it automatically classifies syntactic dependencies according to their selection restrictions. Those dependencies that require the same selection restrictions are put together into the same semantic group. Then, interpretation rules are applied on th...