NAA CL-ANLP 2000 Workshop 
Syntactic and Semantic 
Complexity in Natural 
Language Processing Systems 
Editors/Organizing Committee 
Amit Bagga, James Pustejovsky, Wlodek Zadrozny 
April 30, 2000 
Seattle, Washington 
© 2000, Association for Computational Linguistics 
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PREFACE 
The last decade has seen an explosion in the work done in the development of robust natural 
 processing systems. A common methodology used in building these systems has been to 
analyze a sample of the data available (either manually, or automatically for training statistical 
systems), build statistical/heuristical schemas based upon the analysis, and test the system on a 
blind sample of the data. Due to this commonly used paradigm, an important area of research that 
has not been given the attention it deserves is the estimation of syntactic and semantic complexity 
faced by these systems in the tasks they perform. 
The Workshop on Syntactic and Semantic Complexity in Natural Language Processing Systems, 
held on April 30th, 2000 at the Language Technology Joint Conference on Applied Natural Lan- 
guage Processing and the North American Chapter of the Association of Computational Linguistics 
(ANLP-NAACL2000) was organized around the goals of discussing, promoting, and presenting new 
research results regarding the question of complexity as it pertains to the syntax and semantics of 
natural . In particular, the goal of the workshop was to focus on: 
• estimation of the syntactic and semantic complexity of specific NLP tasks 
• semantic complexity and world knowledge 
• role of syntactic and semantic complexity in system design and testing 
• syntactic and semantic complexity and its role in the evaluation of NLP systems 
• use of syntactic and semantic complexity as a performance predictor 
• relationship between syntactic and semantic complexity 
We would like to thank all authors who showed their interest by submitting papers to the 
workshop. We would also like to thank the members of the program committee: Branimir Boguraev 
(IBM Research), J-P Chanod (Xerox, Grenoble), Shalom Lappin (Kings College, London), Aravind 
Joshi (University of Pennsylvania), Larry Moss (Indiana), Rohit Parikh (CUNY), and Adam Pease 
(Teknowledge). 
Amit Bagga 
James Pustejovsky 
Wlodek Zadrozny 

TABLE OF CONTENTS 
Sentences vs. Phrases: Syntactic Complexity in Multimedia Information Retrieval ................................... 1 
Sharon Flank 
Using Long Runs as Predictors of Semantic Coherence in a Partial Document 
Retrieval System .......................................................................................................................................... 6 
Hyopil Shin and Jerrold F. Stach 
Reducing Lexical Semantic Complexity with Systematic Polysemous Classes 
and Underspecification ................................................................................................................. 14 
Paul Buitelaar 
Automatic Extraction of Systematic Polysemy Using Tree-cut ................................................................. 20 
Noriko Tomuro 
Dependency of context-based Word Sense Disambiguation from representation 
and domain complexity ............................................................................................................................. 28 
Paola Velardi and Alessandro Cucchiarelli 
Analyzing the Reading Comprehension Task ............................................................................................ 35 
Arnit Bagga 
A Measure of Semantic Complexity for Natural Language Systems ......................................................... 42 
Shannon Pollard and Alan W. Biermann 
Example-based Complexity--Syntax and Semantics as the Production of ................................................ 47 
Ad-hoc Arrangements of Examples 
Robert John Freeman 
Partially Saturated Referents as a Source of Complexity in Semantic Interpretation .............................. 51 
David D. McDonald 
Similarities and Differences among Semantic Behaviors of Japanese 
Adnominal Constituents ............................................................................................................................. 59 
Kyoko Kanzaki, Qing Ma, and Hitoshi Isahara 

