A Logic-Based Government-Binding Parser for Mandarin Chinese

Mandarin Chinese is a highly flexible and context-sensitive language. It is difficult to do the case marking and index assignment during the parsing of Chinese sentences. This paper proposes a logic-based Government-Binding approach to treat this problem. The grammar formalism is specified in a formal way. Uniform treatments of movements, arbitrary number of movement non-terminals, automatic detection of grammar errors beforehand, and clear declarative semantics are its specific features. Many common linguistic phenomena of Chinese sentences are represented with this fornmlism. For example, topic-comment structures, the ba-constructions, the bei-constructions, relative clause constructions, appositive clause constructions, and serial verb constructions. A simple pronot,n resolution is touched upon. The expressive capabilities and the design methodologies show this mechanism is also suitable for other flexible and context-sensitive languages.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1990
• Where: COLING
• Authors: Hsin-Hsi Chen
• Keywords: Chinese Sentences, Clause Constructions, COLING 1990, COLING 2008, Context-sensitive Languages