Coordination revisited - A constraint handling rule approach

Abstract

Coordination in natural language (as in "Tom and Jerry", "John built but Mary painted the cupboard", "publish or perish") is one of the most difficult computational linguistic problems. Not only can it affect any type of constituent, but it often involves "guessing" material left implicit. We introduce a CHR methodology for extending a user's grammar not including coordination with a metagrammatical treatment of same category coordination. Our methodology relies on the input grammar describing its semantics compositionally. It involves reifying grammar symbols into arguments of a generic symbol constituent, and adding three more rules to the user's grammar. These three rules can coordinate practically any kind of constituent while reconstructing any missing material at the appropriate point. With respect to previous work, this is powerfully laconic as well as surprisingly minimal in the transformations and overhead required. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2004.