Syntactic Ambiguity Resolution Research Articles

Regression-contingent analyses of eye movements during sentence processing: Reply to Rayner and Sereno

Altmann, Garnham, and Dennis (1992) explored contextual influences on syntactic ambiguity resolution by monitoring eye movements during reading. In order to resolve a conflict of interpretation given that the different eye movement measures yielded different patterns, we introduced a regression-contingent analysis of reading times, separating trials according to whether the eyes departed from the region of interest with a leftward (regressive) or rightward movement. R,ayner and Sereno (1994) argue that various assumptions which they claim underlie the motivation for introducing the regression-contingent measure are in fact flawed. In this paper I demonstrate that these assumptions are incorrectly ascribed to us (while agreeing that they are incorrect), and that Rayner and Sereno's re-analysis oF an earlier study by Rayner, Garrod, and Perfetti (1992) neither questions nor threatens the generalizability of the regression-contingent measure, Finally, I discuss same of the uncertainties surrounding the interpretation of first-pass reading times which further motivate the measure we adopted in Altrnann et al.'s (1992) study.

Probabilistic constraints and syntactic ambiguity resolution

Abstract Natural languages contain probabilistic constraints that influence the resolution of ambiguities. Current models of sentence processing agree that probabilistic constraints affect syntactic ambiguity resolution, but there has been little investigation of the constraints themselves-what they are, how they differ in their effects on processing, and how they interact with one another. Three different types of probabilistic constraints were investigated: “pre-ambiguity” plausibility information, information about verb argument structure frequencies, and “post-ambiguity” constraints that arrive after the introduction of the ambiguity but prior to its disambiguation. Reading times for syntactically ambiguous sentences were compared to reading times for unambiguous controls in three self-paced reading experiments. All three kinds of constraints were found to be helpful, and when several constraints converged, ambiguity resolution was facilitated compared to when constraints conflicted. The importance of...

The lexical nature of syntactic ambiguity resolution [corrected

Ambiguity resolution is a central problem in language comprehension. Lexical and syntactic ambiguities are standardly assumed to involve different types of knowledge representations and be resolved by different mechanisms. An alternative account is provided in which both types of ambiguity derive from aspects of lexical representation and are resolved by the same processing mechanisms. Reinterpreting syntactic ambiguity resolution as a form of lexical ambiguity resolution obviates the need for special parsing principles to account for syntactic interpretation preferences, reconciles a number of apparently conflicting results concerning the roles of lexical and contextual information in sentence processing, explains differences among ambiguities in terms of ease of resolution, and provides a more unified account of language comprehension than was previously available.

The lexical nature of syntactic ambiguity resolution.

The lexical nature of syntactic ambiguity resolution.

Interpretation as abduction

Abduction is inference to the best explanation. In the TACITUS project at SRI we have developed an approach to abductive inference, called “weighted abduction”, that has resulted in a significant simplification of how the problem of interpreting texts is conceptualized. The interpretation of a text is the minimal explanation of why the text would be true. More precisely, to interpret a text, one must prove the logical form of the text from what is already mutually known, allowing for coercions, merging redundancies where possible, and making assumptions where necessary. It is shown how such “local pragmatics” problems as reference resolution, the interpretation of compound nominals, the resolution of syntactic ambiguity and metonymy, and schema recognition can be solved in this manner. Moreover, this approach of “interpretation as abduction” can be combined with the older view of “parsing as deduction” to produce an elegant and thorough integration of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, one that spans the range of linguistic phenomena from phonology to discourse structure. Finally, we discuss means for making the abduction process efficient, possibilities for extending the approach to other pragmatics phenomena, and the semantics of the weights and costs in the abduction scheme.

Context effects in syntactic ambiguity resolution: Discourse and semantic influences in parsing reduced relative clauses.

This article examines how certain types of semantic and discourse context affect the processing of relative clauses which are temporarily ambiguous between a relative clause and a main clause (e.g., "The actress selected by the director ..."). We review recent results investigating local semantic context and temporal context, and we present some new data investigating referential contexts. The set of studies demonstrate that, contrary to many recent claims in the literature, all of these types of context can have early effects on syntactic, ambiguity resolution during on-line reading comprehension. These results are discussed within a "constraint-based" framework for ambiguity resolution in which effects of context are determined by the strength and relevance of the contextual constraint and by the availability of the syntactic alternatives.

The role of thematic structures in interpretation and parsing

Abstract This paper explores how thematic role information associated with verbs is used in language processing. We suggest that thematic roles are useful for co-ordinating different types of information in language processing because they represent aspects of conceptual/semantic representation that map directly on to syntactic form. We review some recent studies investigating the use of thematic information in syntactic ambiguity resolution and present some new evidence that thematic information can be used to eliminate completely the garden path typically associated with reduced-relative clauses. We then review some of our recent work investigating lexical structure in the processing of sentences with long-distance dependencies, and conclude that thematic structure guides the initial interpretation of these sentences. We conclude with a discussion about how thematic information might enable the processing system to make early semantic commitments that take into account relevant aspects of discourse context.

Ambiguity in context

Abstract We discuss theories of sentence parsing, paying particular attention to claims about how context may affect the resolution of syntactic ambiguities. We defend the garden-path theory, arguing that it accounts for a wide range of data that other theories do not account for. The theory proposed by Crain, Altmann, and Steedman is taken as the most attractive alternative, but we argue that its underlying semantic claims are questionable, and we suggest that the data that have been presented in its support are not inconsistent with the garden-path theory.

Semantic properties of the root-pattern array

This paper describes a program (and a grammar) for carrying out the semantic phase of ‘root-pattern’ word formation in Hebrew. This is achieved by first automatically extracting semantic features of roots from a Hebrew thesaurus. Once the roots are reduced to feature-value sets, a grammar is used to combine a specific root with a specific grammatical pattern. The result of the grammar operation yields the final set of semantic features and values for the word. Thus, the root-pattern words are not the minimal units of grammatical investigation. They are products of the grammar. In addition to the ability to automatically generate word meanings, the semantic information derived in this way can serve also for syntactic ambiguity resolution and automatic compilation of machine-oriented dictionaries, thesauri etc. The method described here can also be used for treating affixation and thus be useful for a wide scope of languages, including English, Hebrew and Finnish.

Resolution of syntactic category ambiguities: Eye movements in parsing lexically ambiguous sentences

Three experiments explored the effects of the interaction of lexical and syntactic processes during language comprehension. Subjects read sentences containing lexical items that resulted in syntactic category ambiguities (e.g., desert trains, where desert can be a noun or an adjective and trains can be a verb or a noun). During reading, eye movements were monitored as a reflection of on-line parsing activities. The experiments tested alternative hypotheses about how the processor resolves syntactic category ambiguities. All experiments supported a delay strategy in which the processor delays assigning an analysis to a categorially ambiguous string until it receives disambiguating information dictating the correct analysis of the string. The implications of the results for a general theory of sentence comprehension are discussed.

The resolution of syntactic ambiguity in automatic language processing

This paper describes how the problem of resolution of syntactic ambiguities is approached in the parser PHRASE, developed for use in experiments in automatic indexing and extracting. PHRASE is a multilevel parser for declarative sentences, in which the syntactic structure is built up in four stages. At each stage ambiguities on that level are resolved to yield but one structure for each sentence. At each level the resultant structure is designed to be useful in its own right, and also to form the basis for the analyses at the next higher level. At the various levels of the parser, ambiguity is resolved by rules on legal juxtaposition of parts of speech, legal combination of phrases, constraints on sentence structure, and semantic word government by common nouns and verbs. The nature of these rules is discussed for all four levels of analysis, and examples of the level 1 and 2 analyses, which have been implemented, are given.

On context and ambiguity in parsing

This note is by way of commentary on the notions of “bounded context” of Floyd [1] and “structural connections” of Irons [2], as these notions relate to as yet unpublished researches growing out of the development of the author's Algorithmic Theory of Language [3, 4]. In the closing paragraphs of [3], the author made comments concerning further developments of the theory which would include “context dependence” and “resolution of apparent syntactic ambiguities.” The work on parsing reported here was carried out in early September, 1962 (an earlier version in March, 1962), but has not been polished or reduced to final form because, for the purpose of the total theory, parsing should not be considered separately, and the complexities of the proper treatment of the “precedence string” (which relates to semantic structure as distinct from syntactic structure of parsing) have not yet been satisfactorily resolved.