Syntactic disambiguation using presupposition resolution

What it is about

Statistical parsers struggle with ambiguities where two readings are both common in training data, such as "The man saw the girl with the telescope". The authors propose choosing among the readings of an ambiguous sentence by how well each one fits the current discourse. Each reading becomes a DRS, and its presuppositions are resolved against the context. Two principles decide. The accommodation principle prefers the reading that needs the fewest added conditions. The presuppositional-weight principle, applied when two readings are both fully resolved, prefers the one with more presupposed conditions (for example, 4 conditions against 2 for the information-structure reading of "The cat chased the dog" in an answer to "What chased the dog?"). The method is used in the bilingual Te Kaitito dialogue system. The paper gives no accuracy numbers.

Ideas

• I1. world/src/qud.rs and world/src/qa.rs: when the parser returns several analyses, score each analysis by how many of its presupposed conditions the current world already satisfies, and keep the highest. Use integer counts and BTreeMap ordering so ties are deterministic.
• I2. Add the accommodation count as a penalty: an analysis that needs a new entity in the world costs one unit per entity. Report both scores, so the choice is explained.
• I3. Test on a list of ambiguous school sentences with a short context each, comparing the chosen reading with the one a teacher would give; run twice.

For Mova

The chapter is 29. Ellipsis, word order and information structure (answers and focus) and 33. Implicature and presupposition. The code is world/src/qud.rs and world/src/qa.rs for the question context, and the parse candidates from en/src/parse.rs (or gparse). Measure: agreement with the intended reading on a written list of ambiguous sentences with contexts, both scores reported, run twice.

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

@inproceedings{knott2003syntactic,
  title = {{Syntactic disambiguation using presupposition resolution}},
  author = {Knott, Alistair and Vlugter, Peter},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Australasian Language Technology Workshop 2003},
  year = {2003},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/U03-1006/}
}

References

14 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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