Paper: The Semantics Of Grammar Formalisms Seen As Computer Languages

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Basic Info:

id: P84-1027
title: The Semantics Of Grammar Formalisms Seen As Computer Languages
authors: Pereira, Fernando C. N. (SRI International, Menlo Park CA; Stanford University, Stanford CA), Shieber, Stuart M. (SRI International, Menlo Park CA; Stanford University, Stanford CA)
venue: COLING-ACL
year: 1984
pdf: link


Abstract


The design, implementation, and use of grammar for- ma\]isms for natural language have constituted a major branch of coml)utational linguistics throughout its devel- opment. By viewing grammar formalisms as just a spe- cial ease of computer languages, we can take advantage of the machinery of denotational semantics to provide a pre- cise specification of their meaning. Using Dana Scott's do- main theory, we elucidate the nature of the feature systems used in augmented phrase-structure grammar formalisms, in particular those of recent versions of generalized phrase structure grammar, lexical functional grammar and PATR- I1, and provide a (lcnotational semantics for a simple gram- mar formalism. We find that the mathematical structures developed for this purpose contain an operation of feature generalization, not available in those grammar formalisms, that can be used to give a partial account of the effect of coordination on syntactic features.








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Citation Summary
Citing sentences
P99-1013 1 86:219 -This is essentially similar to the definition of Pereira and Shieber (1984) and Carpenter (1992, pp.
P99-1013 2 26:219 (1995) and the denotational definition of, e.g., Pereira and Shieber (1984) or Carpenter (1992, pp.
J88-1001 3 32:663 As will become evident below, our exercise is complementary in certain respects to that of Pereira and Shieber (1984) and Shieber (1987) and to recent work of Rounds and his associates on the development of a logic for the description of the notions of syntactic category that are embodied in functional unification grammar and PATR II (see Kasper and Rounds (1986), Moshier and Rounds (1987), Rounds and Kasper (1986)).
J88-1001 4 382:663 5 The reader interested in pursuing richer approaches should consult Pereira and Shieber (1984) for a domain-theoretic account of the semantics of categories in LFG, PATR II, and GPSG; Ait-Kaci and Nasr (1986), who capture shared values with a coreference relation on the nodes of the tree; Kasper and Rounds (1986), Moshier and Rounds (1987), and Rounds and Kasper (1986) for a finite state automaton-based logic and semantics for categories in FUG and PATR II; and van Benthem (1986a, b) for an interesting foundational discussion and application of such an automatonbased semantics.
J88-1001 5 298:663 This is in fact proposed in the literature by Shieber (1984) and Pollard (1985).
J88-1001 6 321:663 In FUG Kay (1979, 1985), LFG Kaplan and Bresnan (1982), and work by Shieber and others on PATR II Shieber (1984), this traditional distinction disappears almost entirely.
J88-1001 7 276:663 There is a familiar technique for encoding lists or stacks in a notation which relies on the fact that lists can be decomposed into an initial element and the residual list (see, for example, Shieber (1984)).
J91-2001 8 72:322 Following Kaplan and Bresnan (1982), Pereira and Shieber (1984), Kasper and Rounds (1986, 1990), and Johnson (1988, 1990a) the constraints that determine the feature structures are regarded as formulae from a language for describing feature structures, rather than as feature structures themselves.
P90-1020 9 10:297 It uses very few primitives, has a clean semantics (Pereira&Shieber, 1984, Kasper & Rounds, 1986, E1hadad, 1990), is monotonic, and grants equal status to function and structure in the descriptions.
J84-3001 10 302:379 The most convincing evidence so far against the weak context-freeness of natural languages comes from SwissGerman Shieber (1984) shows that, like Dutch, SwissGerman allows cross-serial order in subordinate clauses but also requires that objects be marked for case, as in German.
J84-3001 11 20:379 Pereira and Shieber (1984) use techniques from the denotational semantics of programming languages to investigate the feature systems of several unification-based theories.
C88-1055 12 106:166 Unification-based systems \[Pereira and Warren, 1980, Pereira and Shieber, 1984, Gawron et al. , 1982\] tend to refine semantic representations by adding semantic FEATURES, represented as variables with assignments.
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