Minimal recursion semantics

Abstract: The LinGO (Linguistic Grammars Online) project’s English Resource Grammar and the LKB grammar development environment are language resources which are freely available for download for any purpose, including commercial use (see http://lingostanfordedu) Executable programs and source code are both included In this paper, we give an outline of the LinGO English grammar and LKB system, and discuss the ways in which they are currently being used The grammar and processing system can be used independently or combined to give a central component which can be exploited in a variety of ways Our intention in writing this paper is to encourage more people to use the technology, which supports collaborative development on many levels

Abstract: The grammar matrix is an open-source starter-kit for the development of broad-coverage HPSGs. By using a type hierarchy to represent cross-linguistic generalizations and providing compatibility with other open-source tools for grammar engineering, evaluation, parsing and generation, it facilitates not only quick start-up but also rapid growth towards the wide coverage necessary for robust natural language processing and the precision parses and semantic representations necessary for natural language understanding.

Abstract: We develop a framework for formalizing semantic construction within grammars expressed in typed feature structure logics, including HPSG. The approach provides an alternative to the lambda calculus; it maintains much of the desirable flexibility of unification-based approaches to composition, while constraining the allowable operations in order to capture basic generalizations and improve maintainability.

Abstract: We describe minimal recursion semantics (MRS), a framework for semantics within HPSG, which considerably simplifies transfer and generation. We discuss why, in general, a semantic representation with minimal structure is desirable for transfer and illustrate how a descriptively adequate representation with a non-recursive structure may be achieved. The paper illustrates the application of MRS to transfer with a series of examples and compares the approach to others which have been previously adopted within unification based frameworks. Our account involves the use of both language-specific and interlingual predicates or relations and we illustrate how this may be exploited to allow MRS to be used to investigate different lexical semantic approaches. 1 Semantic representation and transfer In this paper we describe a semantic representation for HPSG known as minimal recursion semantics (MRS), which is being utilized in the English grammar being developed for the Verbmobil project. Verbmobil is a spoken-dialogue machine translation system, which is designed to take German or .Japanese input relevant to a limited domain and to produce English output. Our aim is to develop a minimally structured but descriptively adequate representation, which allows for various types of underspecification and facilitates generation and the specification of semantic transfer equivalences. MRS is not, in itself, a full-fledged semantic theory. It can perhaps be best thought of as a meta-level language for describing semantic structures within HPSG. Because MRS supports underspecification, an MRS description will correspond to a set of object language expressions. For simplicity, in the examples in this paper we will take the object language to be predicate calculus, but MRS is intended to be compatible with DRT. The advantages of allowing various types of semantic underspecification for translation purposes are well-known (see e.g. Alshawi et al (1991), Kay et al (1994)), so here we concentrate on the advantages of flatness or minimal structure in a semantic representation language. The problem of ensuring that a grammar can generate from a particular semantic representation is well-known: it has been discussed in the context of generation by Shieber (1993) and in machine translation by Landsbergen (1987) and Whitelock (1992)