Regular Tree Grammars as a Formalism for Scope Underspecification

Abstract

We propose the use of regular tree grammars (RTGs) as a formalism for the underspecified processing of scope ambiguities. By applying standard results on RTGs, we obtain a novel algorithm for eliminating equivalent readings and the first efficient algorithm for computing the best reading of a scope ambiguity. We also show how to derive RTGs from more tradi-tional underspecified descriptions.