Scope Underspecification and Processing

Alexander Koller and Joachim Niehren

Lecture Notes, ESSLLI '99, Utrecht, 1999.

This reader contains material for the ESSLLI '99 course, ``Scope Underspecification and Processing''. It is intended as a summary of the most important points of the course and as giving pointers to material for further reading. The reader and course are aimed at a pretty broad audience; we have tried to only presuppose a very general idea of natural language processing and of first-order logic.

Underspecification is a general approach to dealing with ambiguity. In the course, we'll be particularly concerned with scope underspecification, which deals with scope ambiguity, a structural ambiguity of the semantics of a sentence. As scope underspecification is at least partially motivated by computational issues, we will pay particular attention to processing aspects. We're going to show how dominance constraints can be used for scope underspecification and how they can be processed efficiently by using concurrent constraint programming technology.

The reader contains material on scope underspecification (Lectures 1 and 2), concurrent constraint programming (Lectures 3 and 4), and the usage of concurrent constraint technology for processing with scope underspecification (Lecture 5).

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See also the course home page.
BibTex Entry

@Misc{KolNie99, 
   author = {Alexander Koller and Joachim Niehren}, 
   title  = {Scope Underspecification and Processing}, 
   year   = 1999, 
   howpublished = {Lecture Notes, ESSLLI '99, Utrecht} 
} 

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