Kordula De Kuthy and W. Detmar Meurers
In Proceedings of the Tenth Int. Conference on HPSG. Stanford: CSLI Publications.
This paper discusses how the English Resource Grammar (ERG) captures the optionality of certain complements of verbs based on a single lexical entry coupled with an ontology of markings distinguishing optional from obligatory as well as unrealized from realized elements. Subject-head and head-complement structures are modified accordingly, but due to the lack of a possibility to express and use relational goals in grammars implemented in the LKB system, the ERG encoding falls short of the goal of treating optional complements in a general way. Instead, it requires two new types of `auxiliary' phrases which are otherwise unmotivated. We show that the problem can be overcome by using a recursive relation selecting a member from a list. The use of a lean implementation platform not supporting such relational goals, such as the LKB, thus results in a loss of generality of the grammars that can be expressed, which undermines the closeness of the implemented grammar to current linguistic analyses as one of the hallmarks of HPSG-based grammar implementation. The case study presented in this paper thus supports the position argued in Götz and Meurers (1997) that a system for the implementation of HPSG-based grammars should include both universal implicational principles as well as definite clauses over feature terms.
References:
- Thilo Götz and Detmar Meurers (1997). Interleaving Universal Principles And Relational Constraints over Typed Feature Logic. ACL/EACL 97. Madrid, Spain.
The paper appears in the procedings edited by Stefan Müller for CSLI Publications.
Electronically available file formats:
- .pdf (65.537 bytes)
Bibtex entry:
@InProceedings{dekuthy:meurers:hpsg03-b,
author = {De Kuthy, Kordula and Meurers, Walt Detmar},
title = {Dealing with Optional Complements in
HPSG-Based Grammar Implementations},
editor = {Stefan M\"uller},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the Tenth Int. Conference on {HPSG}},
publisher = {CSLI Publications},
address = {Stanford, CA},
url = {http://purl.org/dm/papers/dekuthy-meurers-hpsg03-b.html},
year = {2003}
}