Synchronous Grammars and the Syntax-Semantics Interface

人类语言的话语具有句法结构——由子短语构成的短语——它们的含义也具有结构——例如，应用于论证的谓词。事实上，语法和语义结构的核心案例密切相关，表明它们之间存在直接对应关系。语法-语义接口，即定义句法结构与语义表示之间关系的形式体系结构，应当体现这种对应关系。本研究通过使用同步的形式化概念来表征语法和语义语法之间的关系，促进了对语法-语义接口的理解。语法同步方法构成了模型的基础，该模型经过适当校准后，可以同时提供理论上的简单性、计算上的合理性以及捕捉人类语言语法-语义接口的复杂性的能力。这项研究将允许对语法-语义界面的当前语言学理论进行正式比较，使语言学和计算机科学中分散的研究领域得到更清晰的关注。通过构建和比较处理各种语言结构的语法片段，研究者将研究计算效率和语法和语义语法的形式结构选择及其同步中固有的语言充分性之间的权衡。最终的结果将是对人类语言的结构和意义之间的关系的计算含义的更清晰的描述，以及一种允许有效计算的表达这种关系的方法。因此，它可以作为成功设计系统的一步，这些系统可以执行诸如解释英语或其他语言的句子之类的任务。

The utterances of human languages have syntactic structure -- phrases being built from subphrases -- and their meanings have structure as well -- predicates applying to arguments, for instance. In fact, core cases of syntactic and semantic structure are so closely related as to suggest a direct correspondence between them. The syntax-semantics interface, that is, the formal architecture defining the relation between syntactic structure and semantic representation, ought to manifest this correspondence. This research advances the understanding of the syntax-semantics interface by using the formal concept of synchronization to characterize the relationship between syntactic and semantic grammars. The grammar synchronization method forms the basis for a model that, when properly calibrated, may simultaneously offer theoretical simplicity, computational plausibility, and the ability to capture the intricacies of the syntax-semantics interface for human language. The research will permit formal comparison of current linguistic theories of the syntax-semantics interface, bringing a dispersed area of research in linguistics and computer science into sharper focus. By constructing and comparing grammar fragments that handle a wide range of linguistic constructions, the investigators will study the trade-off between computational efficiency and linguistic sufficiency inherent in a range of choices of formal structures for syntactic and semantic grammars and their synchronization. The end result will be a clearer picture of the computational implications of the relationship between the structure and the meaning of human languages and a method of expressing that relationship that permits efficient computation. As such, it serves as a step towards successful engineering of systems that can perform tasks such as interpreting sentences of English or other languages.