Subcategorization in register vector grammar
Glenn David Blank, Carmel J. Owens · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 1990
Subcategorization enables each word to determine what type of complements it can take. For example, put takes an object plus a locative phrase; one can say I put the cat on my lap but not I put the cat nor I put on my lap. Subcategorization often involves discontinuous constraints (e.g., put and on my lap are discontinuous), which complicates overly sequential syntactic formalisms such as phrase structure rules or transition diagrams. Register Vector Grammar (RVG) is a formalism designed to model discontinuous constraints efficiently. By avoiding redundancy in the number of categories or rules, it keeps grammar size small. By insisting on fixed, finite resources for non-detenninism, it processes sentences in linear time. We haved extended RVG so that it represents subcategories in a manner that, rather than increase computational complexity, actually improves the performance of grammars.