A LOGICAL APPROACH TO MOVEMENT TRANSFORMATIONS IN MANDARIN CHINESE
Hsin‐Hsi Chen, I-Peng Lin, Chien‐Ping Wu · International Journal of Pattern Recognition and Artificial Intelligence · 1988
The movement of constituents in natural language is a very common linguistic phenomenon— topicalization and relativization in Mandarin Chinese, for example. Any successful natural language processing system must be able to deal with these movements and, at the same time, justify them. However, it is difficult to achieve these goals due to the gaps in between the constituents. In this paper, a logic programming approach with Chomsky’s Government-Binding Theory (GB) attempts to solve this type of problems in Chinese language processing. According to GB, the rule of “move-α” moves anything anywhere, and the universal principles operate interactively to rule the illegal movements out. With this point of view, no specific movement constraints are specified in our logic programming approach. The universal principles are embedded in the logic grammars implicitly, and generated by a translator. The specific features of this approach enable grammar-writing to capture extrapositions in Chinese much easier than the other approaches.