An analysis of compounds in HPSG (Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar) for database queries
✍ Scribed by Paul McFetridge; Fred Popowich; Dan Fass
- Publisher
- Elsevier Science
- Year
- 1996
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 1013 KB
- Volume
- 20
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0169-023X
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
Compounds can be analyzed in HPSG as head/complement structures, corresponding to verbal compounds, and head/adjunct structures, corresponding to non-verbal compounds. The rules that create these structures are also responsible for paraphrases using prepositional modification. Although compounds are often thought to have a high structural ambiguity, we show that the distinction between head/complement compounding and head/adjunct compounding together with general semantic considerations eliminates ambiguity. Finally, for database interfaces, the notion of a semantic field is useful for solving problems of noncompositionality of compounds.