Eckhard Bick - VISL

REMOVE (@=X) (*1 @%jn BARRIER @NON-N< LINK 0 @N< LINK NOT 0 @%jh) ;
REMOVE (@=x) (0 @=X) (*-1 @%jh BARRIER @NON->N LINK 0 @>N LINK NOT 0 @%jn);
REMOVE (@=x) (0 @=X) (*1 @%jh BARRIER @NON-N< LINK 0 @N< LINK NOT 0 @%jn) ;
Since the CG rule set keeps reiterating as long as further disambiguation can be
achieved, it is not necessary to formulate similar rules for all +HUM prototypes
individually: The discarding of the H- or h-feature will propagate to other atomic
semantic features and all relevant prototype bundles by means of semantic feature
inheritance rules as described in chapter 6.5.1. Of course, such generalisation is not
mandatory, and in order to reduce the error rate of the parser’s semantic module,
individual prototype rules and context conditions may later be added to the general
rules.
6.5.3 Parsing level interaction in polysemy resolution
A particularly elegant and "incremental" solution for polysemy resolution of
semantically ambiguous words is the semantic exploitation of "lower level parsing
information" (morphological form and syntactic function), which the system already has
disambiguated.
Lexicographically this approach can be implemented by means of what I will call
(polysemy-) discriminators, a concept reminiscent of the discriminators (style, register,
diachronicity, dialect etc.) used in ordinary paper dictionaries (cp. Bick, 1993). Drawing
on subsequent levels of parsing, the following types of pre-semantic discriminators are
used:
• word class subcategory discriminators
An example is the distinction DET vs. DET for the determiner
‘o/a/os/as’, where the translation is ‘the’ and ‘this/those’, respectively.
• inflexional discriminators
Sometimes, nouns change their basic meaning in the plural, so number inflexion helps
to resolve polysemy, as in costa N S (‘coast’) vs. costas NP (‘back’). Verbs, when
inflected as past participles (PCP), sometimes acquire a somewhat different,
“adjectival”, meaning:
V VFIN V PCP
abastar forsyne (supply) abastado velforsynet, velsitueret (well off)
aborrecer afsky (detest) aborrecido træls (irritating)
brigar slås (fight) brigado vred (angry)
calar tie (not speak) calado tavs (quiet)
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