Joachim Quantz (jjq@cs.tu-berlin.de)
Tue, 6 Sep 1994 14:06:08 +0200
Dear Colleagues, I have two related questions on the interface between syntactic parsing and subsequent modules (e.g. semantics, pragmatics) in NLP systems. I assume that the output of a syntactic parser will be something like a phrase structure tree. It seems that in most existing systems the semantic module takes this phrase structure tree as input and PARSES it in order to build up a semantic representation. 1. Are there any systems (or is there any theoretical work), in which the phrase structure tree is treated as an abstract data type for which access predicates are provided? I would be especially interested in syntactic representations which treat the nodes in the phrase structure trees (i.e. the words and phrases) in an object-centered way. `Functional predicates' would then return, for example, - the subject of a sentence - the daughters of a phrase - the topic of a sentence - the direct object of a verb - the preposition of a prepositional phrase - the case of a noun phrase - etc. Obviously, which predicates are applicable at a specific object (node) depends on the type of the object (e.g. sentence, noun phrase, verb). (I know that it is in principle possible to build such an interface on top of, for example, an HPSG-like feature structure. I'd be interested to know whether this has ACTUALLY been done already.) 2. If such interfaces exist, are they designed for a specific syntactic theory, or can they be used for several different syntactic theories? Alternatively, is there any work concerned with identifying linguistic relations (as exemplified by the ones above) which are used in several/many/most/all syntactic theories? Thanks for any information on this, Joachim Quantz | . . __ | J. Joachim Quantz | jjq@cs.tu-berlin.de | | /| /| | | | TU Berlin, FR 5-12 | phone: | | / |/ |/|__| | Projekt KIT-VM11 | +49 30 314 254 94 | | /| /| _|_ | Franklinstr. 28/29 | fax: | | \| \| | | D-10587 Berlin | +49 30 314 249 29 |
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