Treating coordination in logic grammars

Abstract

This paper describes a logic grammar formalism, modifier structure grammars (MSGs), together with an interpreter written in Prolog, which can handle coordination (and other natural language constructions) in a reasonable and general way. The system produces both syntactic analyses and logical forms, and problems of scoping for coordination and quantifiers are dealt with. The MSG formalism seems of interest in its own right (perhaps even outside natural language processing) because the notions of syntactic structure and semantic interpretation are more constrained than in many previous systems (made more implicit in the formalism itself), so that less burden is put on the grammar writer