9 - Constraint Propagation and Semantic Representation

Abstract

This chapter reviews constraint propagation and semantic representation. Linguistic formalisms used in the computational linguistics which adopt a uniform approach to the representation of different types of linguistic information permit various linguistic domains to constrain each other directly without the need to filter information through a hierarchy of different levels of linguistic representation. This technique is known as constraint propagation. There is a key area in the development of any linguistic formalism, over which it is possible to demonstrate the use and misuse of constraint propagation. There are however two potential problems with this approach: the lack of applications of the technique to other domains and the traditional conception of the syntax–semantics interface. The major constraint propagation formalism approaches to both syntactic and semantic representation have a negative motivation for considering the relation between syntactic and semantic representation; there is currently insufficient application of constraint propagation to other domains for any kind of comparison to be possible.