A Uniform Approach to Underspecification and Parallelism

We propose a unified framework in which to treat semantic underspecification and parallelism phenomena in discourse. The framework employs a constraint language that can express equality and subtree relations between finite trees. In addition, our constraint language can express the equality up-to relation over trees which captures parallelism between them. The constraints are solved by context unification. We demonstrate the use of our framework at the examples of quantifier scope, ellipsis, and their interaction. 1

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1997
• Where: ACL
• Authors: Joachim Niehren, Manfred Pinkal, Peter Ruhrberg
• Keywords: ACL 1997, ACL 2007, Constraint Language, Equality Up-to Relation, Parallelism Phenomena