Disambiguation by information structure in DRT
Kurt Eberle · 1996
Text understanding and high quality machine translation often necessitate the disambiguation of ambigous structures or lexical elements. Drawing inferences from the context can be a means for resolving semantic ambiguities. However, often, this is an expensive strategy that, in addition, not always comes up with a clear preference for one of the alternatives. In this paper, we argue that in a number of cases deep semantic analyses can be avoided by taking into account the constraints that the alternative readings impose onto the information structure. To this end, we present a study of the ambigous German adverb erst and point out the particular circumstances under which the given information structure disambiguates the adverb without further semantic analysis.