Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-2plfb Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-25T13:30:48.451Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Anaphora and ellipsis in artificial languages

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 September 2008

Stephen G. Pulman
Stephen G. Pulman
Affiliation:
SRI International Cambridge Computer Science Research Centre, 23 Mill Lane, Cambridge CB2 1RQ, UK. Email: [email protected] and University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Artificial languages for person-machine communication seldom display the most characteristic properties of natural languages, such as the use of anaphoric or other referring expressions, or ellipsis. This paper argues that useful use could be made of such devices in artificial languages, and proposes a mechanism for the resolution of ellipsis and anaphora in them using finite state transduction techniques. This yields an interpretation system displaying many desirable properties: easily implementable, efficient, incremental and reversible.

Linguists in general, and computational linguists in particular, do well to employ finite state devices wherever possible. They are theoretically appealing because they are computationally weak and best understood from a mathematical point of view. They are computationally appealing because they make for simple, elegant, and highly efficient implementations. In this paper, I hope I have shown how they can be applied to a problem… which seems initially to require heavier machinery.

Type
Articles
Information
Natural Language Engineering , Volume 1 , Issue 3 , September 1995 , pp. 217 - 234
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Alshawi, H., (ed.) 1992. The Core Language Engine. Boston, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Aho, A.V. and Ullman, J.D., 1972. The Theory of Parsing, Translation, and Compiling. Engle-wood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.Google Scholar
Aho, A.V. and Ullman, J.D., 1977. Principles of Compiler Design. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.Google Scholar
Chomsky, N., 1957. Syntactic Structures. The Hague: Mouton.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Church, K., 1980. On Memory Limitations in Natural Language Processing. Technical Report LCS/Tr-245, MIT.Google Scholar
Kaplan, R. and Kay, M., 1994. Regular models of phonological rule systems. Computational Linguistics. 20(3): 331–378.Google Scholar
Karttunen, L., Kaplan, R. and Zaenen, A., 1992. Two-level morphology with composition. In COLING-92, Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Computational Linguistics. Pp. 141–148.Google Scholar
Kay, M., 1984. When meta-rules are not meta-rules. In Jones, K. Sparck and Wilks, Y., (eds.) Automatic Natural Language Parsing. Chichester: Ellis Horwood. Pp. 94–116.Google Scholar
Kay, M., 1987. Nonconcatenative finite state morphology. In Proceeedings of the 3rd European Conference of the Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL: Copenhagen, Denmark. Pp. 2–10.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Koskenniemi, K., 1984. A general computational model for word-form recognition and production. In COLING-84, Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Computational Linguistics. Pp. 178–181.Google Scholar
Koskenniemi, K. and Church, K., 1988. Complexity, two-Level morphology, and finnish. In COLING-88, Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Computational Linguistics. Pp. 335–340.Google Scholar
Pereira, F.C.N. and Wright, R.N., 1991. Finite state approximations of phrase structure grammars. In Proceedings of the 29th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL: Berkeley, CA.Google Scholar
Pulman, S.G., 1986. Grammars, parsers and memory limitations. In Language and Cognitive Processes. 1(3): 197–225.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ritchie, G.D., Black, A.W., Russell, G.J. and Pulman, S.G., 1992. Computational Morphology. Boston, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar