How features resolve syntactic ambiguity

Abstract

Ambiguity is a pervasive and important aspect of natural language. Ambiguities, which are disambiguated by context, contribute powerfully to the expressiveness of natural language as compared to formal languages. In computational systems using natural language, problems of properly controlling ambiguity are particularly large, partially because of the necessity to circumvent parsings due to multiple orderings in the application of rules.Features, that is, subcategorizations of parts-of-speech, constitute an effective means for controlling syntactic ambiguity through ordering the hierarchical organization of syntactic constituents. This is the solution adopted for controlling ambiguity in REL English, which is part of the REL (Rapidly Extensible Language) System. REL is a total software system for facilitating man/machine communications. The efficiency of processing natural language in REL English is achieved both by the detailed syntactic aspects which are incorporated into the REL English grammar, and by means of the particular implementation for processing features in the parsing algorithm.