NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING WITHIN A SLOT GRAMMAR FRAMEWORK
Michael C. McCord, Arendse Bernth, Shalom Lappin, Wlodek Zadrozny · International Journal of Artificial Intelligence Tools · 1992
This paper contains brief descriptions of the latest form of Slot Grammar and four natural language processing systems developed in this framework. Slot Grammar is a lexicalist, dependency-oriented grammatical system, based on the systematic expression of linguistic rules and data in terms of slots (essentially grammatical relations) and slot frames. The exposition focuses on the kinds of analysis structures produced by the Slot Grammar parser. These structures offer convenient input to post-syntactic processing (in particular to the applications dealt with in the paper); they contain in a single structure a useful combination of surface structure and logical form. The four applications discussed are: (1) An anaphora resolution system dealing with both NP anaphora and VP anaphora (and combinations of the two). (2) A meaning postulate based inference system for natural language, in which inference is done directly with Slot Grammar analysis structures. (3) A new transfer system for the machine translation system LMT, based on a new representation for Slot Grammar analyses which allows more convenient tree exploration. (4) A parser of "constructions", viewed as an extension of the core grammar allowing one to handle some linguistic phenomena that are often labeled "extragrammatical", and to assign a semantics to them.