Fourth Conference 
of the 
European Chapter 
of the 
Association for 
Computational Linguistics 
Proceedings of the Conference 
10- 12 April 1989 
University of Manchester 
Institute of Science and Technology 
Manchester, England 
Published by the Association for Computational Linguistics 
©1989, Association for Computational Linguistics 
Order copies of this and other ACL proceedings from: 
Donald E. Walker (ACL) 
Bell Communications Research 
445 South Street MRE 2A379 
Morristown, NJ 07960-1961, USA 
Printed in Great Britain by BPCC Wheatons Ltd, Exeter 
- ii - 
PREFACE 
This volume contains texts of the papers presented at the Fourth Conference of 
the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, reserve papers, 
and tutorial abstracts. 
Over 130 papers were submitted for the conference, and the overall standard was 
high: it was with regret and difficulty that the Programme Committee were able to 
accept only 45, even including parallel sessions and reserve papers. We are grateful to 
all those who submitted papers, to the Programme Committee and referees for reading 
them, and to all who worked hard on local arrangements. Our thanks in particular to 
Prof. J. C. Sager and to the secretarial staff of the Centre for Computational 
Linguistics, UMIST for many forms of moral and material support. Don Walker and 
the officials of the European Chapter, Maghi King, Beat Buchmann, and Mike Rosner, 
also did much to make it all possible. 
Harold Somers, UMIST 
Mary McGee Wood, Manchester 
Joint Programme Committee and 
Local Arrangements Chairs 
Programme Committee 
Christian Boitet, GETA/UMSG, Grenoble 
Bran Boguraev, Cambridge Computer Lab & IBM Yorktown Heights NY 
Laurence Danlos, LADL, Pads 
Anne de Roeck, University of Essex (tutorials) 
Gerald Gazdar, University of Sussex 
Jdrgen Kunze, Akademie der Wissenschaften der DDR, Berlin 
Michael Moortgat, Universiteit Leiden 
Harold Somers, UMIST Manchester (co-chair) 
Oliviero Stock, IRST, Povo/Trento 
Henry Thompson, University of Edinburgh 
Dan Tufi~, Central Institute for Management and Inforrnatics, Bucharest 
Mary McGee Wood, University of Manchester (co-chair) 
- 111 - 
Local Arrangements Committee 
Paul Bennett 
Martin Earl 
Lindsey Hammond 
John McNaught 
Jeanette Pugh 
Harold Somers 
Mary McGee Wood 
Referees 
Lars Ahrenberg (Linkdping) 
Gerard Bailly (Grenoble) 
Ted Briscoe (Lancaster) 
Jean-Louis Binot (Everberg) 
Nicoletta Caizolari (Pisa) 
John Carroll (Cambridge) 
Robin Cooper (Edinburgh) 
Waiter Daelemans (Brussel) 
Roger Evans (Sussex) 
Giovanni Guida (Milano) 
Hans Hailer (SaarbrtYcken) 
Peter Hellwig (Heidelberg) 
Gerard Kempen (Nijmegen) 
James Kilbury (Dtt'sseldorf) 
Steven Krauwer (Utrech0 
Jock McNaught (Manchester) 
Michael McTear (Ulster) 
Willem Meijs (Amsterdam) 
Vladimir Pericliev (Sofija) 
Steve Pulman (Cambridge) 
Elisabeth Ranchhod (Lisboa) 
Graeme Ritchie (Edinburgh) 
Christian Rohrer (Stuttgart) 
Dietmar R6'sner (Darmstadt) 
Bengt Sigurd (Lund) 
Petr Sgall (Praha) 
Jon Slack (Milton Keynes) 
Pete Whitelock (Edinburgh) 
Gerd Willee (Bonn) 
- iv - 
Programme of events 
6.00 - 9.00 pm Registration for tutorials 
9.00 - 10.00 am Registration for tutorials 
Saturday 8th April 
Sunday 9th April 
10.00 - 11.00 and 11.30 - 1.00 Tutorials on Discourse (Bonnie Lynn Webber) 
or Machine translation (Jun-ichi Tsujii) 
1.00 - 2.30 Lunch 
2.30 - 3.30 and 4.00 - 5.30 Tutorials on Categorial grammars (Mark Steedman) 
or The lexicon (Bran Boguraev) 
6.00 onwards Registration for conference 
7.30 Reception 
Monday 10th April 
9.00 - 9.30 Registration 
9.30 Opening remarks: J.C. Sager (UMIST Manchester) and Maghi King (ACL European Chapter 
Chair) 
10.00 Invited paper: James Pustejovsky (Brandeis University Waltham MA) Current issues in 
Computational Lexical Semantics 
11.00 Coffee break 
11.30 Anne Abeill~ & Yves Schabes (LADL Paris & UPenn Philadelphia) Parsing idioms in lexicalized 
TAGs 
12.00 Mark Hepple & Glyn Morrill (University of Edinburgh) Parsing and derivational equivalence 
12.30 Gosse Bouma (Research Institute for Knowledge Systems, Maastricht) Efficient processing of 
flexible categorial grammar 
1.00 Lunch 
2.30 Michael Gerlach & Helmut Horaeek (Universit//t Hamburg) Dialog control in a natural language 
system 
3.00 Lance A. Ramshaw (BBN Systems and Technologies Corporation Cambridge MA) A metaplan 
model for problem-solving discourse 
-V- 
3.30 Kurt Eberle & Walter Kasper (Universit~/t Stuttgart) Tenses as anaphora 
4.00 Tea break 
4.30 Graeme Ritchie (University of Edinburgh) On the generative power of two-level morphological 
rules 
5.00 Jonathan Calder (University of Edinburgh) Paradigmatic morphology 
5.30 Roger Evans & Gerald Gazdar (University of Sussex) Inference in DATR 
7.30 Dinner (optional) in UMIST Harwood Room 
Tuesday llth April 
9.30 Hiroaki Kitano, Hideto Tomabechi & Loft Levin (Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh) 
Ambiguity resolution in DmTrans Plus 
10.00 Jan Odijk (Philips Research Laboratories Eindhoven) The organization of the Rosetta grammars 
10.30 Jan Haji~ (Charles University Prague) Morphotactics by attribute grammar 
11.00 Coffee break 
Parallel session A: 
11.30 Patrick Saint-Dizier (UniversR Paul Sabatier Toulouse) Programming in logic with constraints for 
natural language processing 
12.00 Hirosi Tuda, K6iti Hasida & Hidetosi Sirai (University of Tokyo, ICOT Tokyo & Tamagawa 
University Tokyo) JPSG parser on constraint logic programming 
12.30 Mike Reape (University of Edinburgh) A logical treatment of semi-free word order and bounded 
discontinuous constituency 
Parallel session B: 
11.30 Joan L.G. Baart (University of Leiden) Focus and accent in a Dutch text-to-speech system 
12.00 Steve Whittaker & Phil Stenton (Hewlett-Packard Laboratories Bristol) User studies and the 
design of natural language systems 
12.30 Danilo Fum, Paolo Giangrandi & Carlo Tasso (Universitd di Trieste & Universitd di Udine) Tense 
generation in an intelligent tutor for foreign language teaching: some issues in the design of the verb 
expert 
1.00 Lunch 
- Vi - 
Parallel session A: 
2.30 Ulrich Held & Sybille Raab (Universitat Stuttgart) Collocations in multilingual generation 
3.00 David M. Carter (SRI International Cambridge) Lexical acquisition in the core language engine 
3.30 Dan Tufi~ (Institute for Computer Technique and Information Bucharest) It would be much easier 
if went were good 
Parallel session B: 
2.30 C16o JuUien & Jean-Charles Marty (Cap Sogeti Innovation Grenoble) Plan revision in person- 
machine dialogue 
3.00 Carom Eschenbach, Christopher Habel, Michael Herweg & Klaus Rehldtmper (Universit~lt 
Hamburg) Remarks on plural anaphora 
3.30 Mark T. Maybury (Rome Air Development Center Griffiss AFB NY) Enhancing explanation 
coherence with rhetorical strategies 
4.00 Tea break 
4.30 Marc Moens, Jo Calder, Ewan Klein, Mike Reape & Henk Zeevat (University of Edinburgh GBr) 
Expressing generalizations in unification-based grammar formalisms 
5.00 Rod Johnson & Mike Rosner (IDSIA Lugano & ISSCO Gendve) A rich environment for 
experimentation with unification grammars 
5.30 Erik-Jan van der Linden (University of Brabant Tilburg) Lambek theorem proving and feature 
unification 
7.00 coach(es) depart for banquet 
Banquet (7.30 for 8) at SmithiUs Coaching House, Bolton 
Wednesday 12th April 
9.30 Jdrgen Kunze (Akademie der Wissenschaften der DDR Berlin) A formal representation of 
propositions and temporal adverbials 
I0.00 Jan Tore L0nning (University of Oslo) Computational semantics of mass terms 
10.30 Allan Ramsay (University of Sussex) Extended graph unification 
11.00 Coffee break 
11.30 Lyn Pemberton (University of Sussex) A modular approach to story generation 
12.00 Fiammetta Namer (Universit~ de Paris VII) Subject erasing in Italian text generation 
12.30 Jonathan Calder, Mike Reape & Henk Zeevat (University of Edinburgh) An algorithm for 
generation in Unification Categorial Grammar 
1.00 Lunch 
- vii - 
2.30 Mats Wirdn (Linkdping University) Interactive incremental chart parsing 
3.00 Gabriel G. Bds & Claire Gardent (Universitd de Clermont II & Centre for Cognitive Science 
Edinburgh) French order without order 
3.30 Lita Taylor, Claire Grover & Ted Briscoe (University of Lancaster) The syntactic regularity of 
English noun phrases 
4.00 Tea break 
4.30 Masako Kume, Gayle K. Sato & Kei Yoshimoto (ATR Osaka)A descriptive framework for 
translating speaker's meaning: Towards a dialogue translation system between Japanese and English 
5.00 Ronald M. Kaplan, Klaus Netter, Jdrgen Wedekind & Annie Zaenen (Xerox Palo Alto Research 
Center & Universi~t Stuttgart) Translation by structural correspondences 
5.30 John Bateman, Robert Kasper, Jdrg Schdtz & Erich Steiner (ISI/USC Marina del Re), CA & IAI 
Snarbrdcken Ger) A new view on the process of translation 
6.00 Conference ends 
Reserve papers 
Ntis Dahlb~/ck & Arne Jdnsson (Linkdping University) Empirical studies of discourse representations 
for natural language interfaces 
Gertjan van Noord, Joke Dorrepaal, Doug Arnold, Steven Krauwer, Louisa Sadler, & Louis des Tombo 
(University of Essex & Rijksuniversiteit Utrecht) An approach to sentence-level anaphora in machine 
translation 
CJ. Rupp (UMIST Manchester) Situation semantics and machine translation 
Zaharin Yusoff (Universiti Sains Malaysia Penang) On formalisms and analysis, generation and 
synthesis in machine translation 
.°. 
- Vlll - 
Contents 
Tutorial Abstracts 
Discourse 
Bonnie Lynn Webber 
Machine translation 
Jun-ichi Tsujii 
Categorial grammars 
Mark Steedman 
The lexicon 
Bran Boguraev 
xv 
xv 
xv 
xvi 
Current issues in computational lexical semantics 
James Pustejovsky 
Parsing idioms in lexicalized TAGs 
Anne Abeilld & Yves Schabes 
Parsing and derivational equivalence 
Mark Hepple & Glyn Morrill 
Efficient processing of flexible categorial grammar 
Gosse Bouma 
Dialog control in a natural language system 
Michael Gerlach & Helmut Horacek 
A metaplan model for problem-solving discourse 
Lance A. Ramshaw 
Tenses as anaphora 
Kurt Eberle & Walter Kaspor 
On the generative power of two-level morphological rules 
Graeme Ritchie 
Paradigmatic morphology 
Jonathan Calder 
Inference in DATR 
Roger Evans & Gerald Gazdar 
Ambiguity resolution in DmTrans Plus 
Hiroaki Kitano, Hidcto Tomabechi & Lori I..¢vin 
The organization of the Rosetta grammars 
Jan Odijk 
Programming in logic with constraints for natural language processing 
Patrick Saint-Dizier 
JPSG parser on constraint logic programming 
Hirosi Tuda, K6ifi Hasida & I-Iidctosi Sirai 
A logical treatment of semi-free word order and bounded discontinuous constituency 
Mike Rcape 
xvii 
10 
19 
27 
35 
43 
51 
58 
66 
72 
80 
87 
95 
103 
-ix- 
Focus and accent in a Dutch text-to-speech system 
Joan L.G. Baart 
User studies and the design of natural language systems 
Steve Whittaker & Phil Stenton 
Tense generation in an intelligent tutor for foreign language teaching: 
some issues in the design of the verb expert 
Danilo Fum, Paolo Giangrandi & Carlo Tasso 
Collocations in multilingual generation 
Ulrich Heid & Sybille Raab 
Lexical acquisition in the core language engine 
David M. Carter 
It would be much easier if went were goed 
Dan Tufts 
Plan revision in person-machine dialogue 
Clio Jullien & Jean-Charles Marty 
Remarks on plural anaphora 
Carola Eschenbach, Christopher Habel, Michael Herweg & Klaus Rehk~imper 
Enhancing explanation coherence with rhetorical strategies 
Mark T. Maybury 
Expressing generalizations in unification-based grammar formalisms 
Marc Moens, Jo Calder, Ewan Klein, Mike Reape & Henk Zeevat 
A rich environment for experimentation with unification grammars 
Rod Johnson & Michael Rosner 
Lambek theorem proving and feature unification 
Erik-Jan van der Linden 
A formal representation of propositions and temporal adverbials 
Jdrgen Kunze 
Computational semantics of mass terms 
Jan Tore L~nning 
Extended graph unification 
Allan Ramsay 
A modular approach to story generation 
Lyn Pemberton 
Subject erasing and pronominalization in Italian text generation 
Fiammetta Namer 
An algorithm for generation in Unification Categorial Grammar 
Jonathan Calder, Mike Reape & Henk Zeevat 
Interactive incremental chart parsing 
Mats Wirdn 
French order without order 
Gabriel G. B6s & Claire Gardent 
The syntactic regularity of English noun phrases 
Lita Taylor, Claire Grover & Ted Briscoe 
111 
115 
24 
130 
137 
145 
153 
161 
168 
174 
182 
190 
197 
205 
212 
217 
225 
233 
241 
249 
256 
-X- 
A descriptive framework for translating speaker's meaning:. 
towards a dialogue translation system between Japanese and English 
Masako Kume, Gayle K. Sato & Kei Yoshimoto 
Translation by structural correspondences 
Ronald M. Kaplan, Klans Netter, Jllrgen Wedekind & Annie Zaenen 
A new view on the process of translation 
John A. Bateman, Robert T. Kaspe~, J~rg F.L. Schdtz & Erich H. Steiner 
An approach to sentence-level anaphora in machine translation 
Gertjan van Noord, Joke Dorrepaal, Doug Arnold, Steven Krauwer, 
Louisa Sadier & Louis des Tombe 
Empirical studies of discourse representations for natural language interfaces 
Nils Dahlb//ck & Arne JOnsson 
Situation semantics and machine translation 
CJ. Rupp 
On formalisms and analysis, generation and synthesis in machine 
translation 
Zaharin Yusoff 
264 
272 
282 
299 
291 
308 
319 
" xi - 
Author Index 
Anne Abeilld I 
Doug Arnold 299 
Joan L.G. Baart 111 
John A. Bateman 282 
Gabriel G. B~s 249 
Bran Boguraev xvi 
Gosse Bouma 19 
Ted Briscoe 256 
Jo Calder 58 174 233 
David M. Carter 137 
Ntis Dahlb~/ck 291 
Joke Dorrepaal 299 
Kurt Eberle 43 
Carola Eschenbach 161 
Roger Evans 66 
Danilo Fum 124 
Claire Gardent 249 
Gerald Gazdar 66 
Michael Gerlach 27 
Paolo Giangrandi 124 
Claire Grover 256 
Christopher Habel 161 
Kditi Hasida 95 
Ulrich Heid 130 
Mark Hepple 10 
Michael Herweg 161 
Helmut Horacek 27 
Rod Johnson 182 
Arne Jdnsson 291 
Cldo Jullien 153 
Ronald M. Kaplan 272 
Robert T. Kasper 282 
Walter Kasp~r 43 
Hiroaki Kitano 72 
Ewan Klein 174 
Steven Krauwer 299 
Masako Kume 264 
Jffrgen Kunze 197 
Lori Levin 72 
Erik-Jan van der Linden 190 
Jan Tore I.~nning 205 
Jean-Charles Marry 153 
Mark T. Maybury 168 
Mare Moens 174 
Glyn Morrill 10 
Fiammetta Namer 225 
Klaus Netter 272 
Gertjan van Noord 299 
Jan Odijk 80 
Lyn Pemberton 217 
James Pustejovsky xvii 
Sybille Ranb 130 
Allan Ramsay 212 
Lance A. Ramshaw 35 
Mike Reape 103 174 233 
- xii - 
Klaus Rehldimper 
Graeme Ritehie 
Mike Rosner 
CJ. Rupp 
Louisa Sadler 
Patrick Saint-Dizier 
Gayle K. Sam 
Yves Schabes 
Jdrg F.L. Schutz 
Hidetosi Sirai 
Mark Steedman 
Erich H. Stciner 
Phil Stenton 
Carlo Tasso 
Lita Taylor 
Hideto Tomabechi 
Louis des Tombe 
Jun-ichi Tsujii 
Hirosi Tuda 
Dan Tufi~ 
Bonnie Lynn Webber 
Jffrgen Wedekind 
Steve Whittaker 
Mats Wirdn 
Kei Yoshimoto 
Annie Zaenen 
Yusoff Zabarin 
Henk Zeevat 
161 
51 
182 
308 
299 
87 
264 
1 
282 
95 
xv 
282 
116 
124 
256 
72 
299 
xv 
95 
145 
XV 
272 
116 
241 
264 
272 
319 
174 233 
Subject Index (compiled from authors' key words) 
abbreviations 
accent 
ambiguity resolution 
anaphora 
bounded discontinuous constituency 
CALL 
Categorial grammar 
categories 
chart parsing 
collocations 
constraint logic programming 
derivational equivalence 
dialogue 
dialogue control 
dialogue translation 
discourse 
Dutch 
English 
explanation 
feature unification 
feature value logics 
finite-state transducers 
focus 
French 
generalizations 
generalized quantifiers 
generation 
generative power 
grammar description 
grammatical formalisms 
idioms 
inferences 
interfaces 
intonation 
isomorphy 
Italian 
Japanese 
JPSG 
knowledge representation 
Lambek theorem proving 
language teaching 
lexical acquisition 
lexical semantics 
lexicography 
lexicology 
lexicon 
logic programming 
logical equivalence 
Machine Translation 
man-machine dialogue 
mass terms 
metaplan 
morphology 
noun phrases 
orthography 
212 
"111 
72 
43 161 299 
103 
124 
xv 19 249 
212 
241 
130 
87 95 
10 
27 
27 
264 
xv 35 43 153 161 168 291 
111 
256 264 
168 
190 
103 
51 
111 161 
249 
174 
205 
319 
51 
212 
174 272 319 
1 
197 
291 
111 
80 
225 
264 
95 
43 66 
190 
124 
137 
xvii 
137 
58 
xvi 66 130 
87 95 103 
233 
319 
153 
205 
35 
51 58 66 145 
256 
58 
124130 217 225 233 282 
116 153 205 
xvi 72 80 264 272 282 299 308 
llo 
- Xlll - 
parsing 
person-machine dialogue 
phonology 
plan tracking 
planning 
plural 
pragmatic models 
problem-solving 
pronominalization 
rhetorical strategies 
semantics 
Situation Semantics 
speech synthesis 
story structure 
subject erasing 
syntax 
TAGs 
temporal logic 
temporal relations 
tense 
text-to-speech systems 
theorem proving 
tree-adjoining grammars 
two-level morphology 
Unification Categorial Grammar 
unification 
user studies 
word order 
1 10 19 95 241 
153 
58 
35 
153 
161 
35 
35 
225 
168 
197 205 
308 
111 
217 
225 
80 249 256 
1 
197 
197 
43 124 
111 
19 
1 
51 
233 
58 95 174 182 190 212 233 
116 
103 249 
- xiv - 
Tutorial Abstracts 
Machine Translation 
Jun-ichi Tsujii (UMIST) 
MT systems developed so far are surveyed, and the basic characteristics 
of MT which distinguish it from other NLP applications are discussed. New trends in 
research such as telephone dialogue translation, knowledge-based MT etc. are also 
discussed. 
Discourse 
Bonnie Lynn Webber (U Penn) 
Discourse places two demands on a communicative agent: (1) the need to comprehend 
and produce multiple utterances, each being interpreted in the context of those 
preceding it, and (2) the need to treat utterances as intentional behavior. Both 
processes seem to be inherently computational. That is, to model changes in context 
and attention requires consideration of the side effects of understanding and producing 
utterances. Similarly, interpreting and responding to utterances as intentional behavior 
requires support for planning and plan inference. This tutorial explores emerging 
computational models and methods for both contextual and intentional aspects of 
discourse. 
Combinatory Categorial Grammars 
Mark Steedman (U Penn) 
The session will discuss a generalisation of Categorial Grammar based on the inclusion 
of a few syntactic operations related to "combinators", such as functional composition. 
The theory implies a radical revision of accepted notions of surface structure and 
constituency, with interesting implications for theories of the production and 
comprehension of spoken and written language. 
The theory will be presented in the first instance as a theory of syntactic competence, 
with particular attention to constructions involving coordination and unbounded 
dependency. Attention will be paid to certain universal properties of such 
constructions across languages. The discussion will then be widened to consider the 
implications of this theory of syntax for selected problems in prosody and intonation, 
incremental semantic interpretation, and processing. 
- XV ° 
The lexicon 
Bran Boguraev (Cambridge Computer Lab & IBM Yorktown Heights) 
Knowledge of and about words underlies all natural language processing tasks. This 
tutorial will focus on the complementary questions of content and format(s) of 
computational lexicons, after looking in some detail at the specific lexical requirements 
of natural language processing systems. 
In particular, we will study some recent developments in theories of grammar and 
lexical semantics, and observe the implications in the way they handle lexical 
information for the organization of computational lexicons. We will trace, through a 
number of illustrative examples, issues like formalization of lexical information, 
flexibility and extendability of lexicon formats, scaling up prototype lexical systems, 
and acquisition of lexical knowledge, and observe how these inter-relate during the 
process of designing lexical components for realistic natural language processing 
systems. 
o xvi ° 
Current Issues in Computational Lexical Semantics 
James Pustejovsky 
Brandeis University 
Waltham, MA. USA 
Abstract 
In this talk I would like to address some issues of major importance in lexical semantics. In particular, I 
will discuss four topics relating to current research in the field: methodology, descriptive coverage, 
adequacy of the representation, and the computational usefulness of representations. In addressing these 
issues, I will discuss what I think are some of the central problems facing the lexical semantics 
community, and suggest ways of best approaching these issues. Finally, I outline a theory of lexical 
semantics embodying a richer notion of compositionality, termed cocomposition, which aims to spread 
the semantic load more evenly throughout the lexicon. 
1. Introduction 
I believe we have reached an interesting turning point in research, where linguistic studies can be 
informed by computational tools for lexicology as well as an appreciation of the computational 
complexity of large lexical databases. Likewise, computational research can profit from an awareness of 
the grammatical and syntactic distinctions of lexical items; natural language processing systems must 
account for these differences in their lexicons and grammars. The wedding of these disciplines is so 
important, in fact, that I believe it will soon be impossible to carry out serious computational research 
in our field without the help of electronic dictionaries and computational lexicographic resources 
\[Walker, 1986\]. Positioned at the center of this synthesis is the study of word meaning, lexical 
semantics, which is currently witnessing a minor revival. 
Given this, I would like to turn to a few issues that I feel the lexical semantics community should 
address. In particular, I will pose the following four questions: 
1. Has recent work in lexical semantics been methodologically any sounder than the previous work in 
the field? 
2. Do theories being developed today have any broader coverage than the earlier descriptive work? 
3. Do current theories provide any new insights into the representation of knowledge for the global 
structure of the lexicon? 
4. Finally, has recent work provided the computational community with useful resources for parsing, 
generation, and translation research? 
Before answering these questions, I would like to establish two points that will figure prominently in 
our critique of the field. The first is that, without an appreciation of the syntactic structure of a 
language, the study of lexical semantics is bound to fail. There is no way in which meaning can be 
completely divorced from the structure that carries it. This is more a methodological point than 
anything else, since grammatical distinctions are a useful metric in evaluating competing semantic 
theories. 
c~--, - xvii - 
The second point is that the meanings of words should somehow reflect the deeper, conceptual 
structures in the system and the domain it operates in. This is tantamount to stating that the semantics 
of natural language should be the image of (nonlinguistic) conceptual organizing principles (whatever 
their structure). 
Some of the major points I would like to make here are the following. First, a clear notion of semantic 
well-formedness will be necessary in order to characterize a theory of possible word meaning. This may 
entail idealizing the notion of lexical meaning away from other semantic influences. For instance, this 
might suggest that discourse and pragmatic factors should be handled differently or separately from the 
semantic contributions of lexical items in composition (contra \[Hobbs, 1987\]. Although this is not a 
necessary assumption and may in fact be wrong, it may help narrow our focus on what is important for 
lexical semantic descriptions. 
Secondly, lexical semantics must look for representations that are richer than thematic role descriptions 
\[Fillmore, 1968\]. As argued in \[Levin and Rappaport, 1986\], named roles are useful, at best, for 
establishing fairly general mapping strategies to the syntactic structures in language. The distinctions 
possible with "theta" roles are much too coarse-grained to provide a useful semantic interpretation of a 
sentence. What is needed, therefore, is a principled method of lexical decomposition. This presupposes, 
if it is to work at all, (1) a rich, recursive theory of semantic composition, (2) the notion of semantic 
well-formedness mentioned above, and (3) an appeal to levels of interpretation in the semantics \[Scha, 
1983\]. 
Thirdly, and related to the point above, the lexicon is not just verbs. Recent work has done much to 
clarify the nature of verb classes and the syntactic constructions that each allows \[Levin, 1985\]. Yet it 
is not clear whether we are any closer to understanding the underlying nature of verb meaning, why the 
classes develop as they do, and what consequences these distinctions have for the rest of the lexicon 
and grammar. The curious thing is that there has been little attention paid to the other lexical categories 
(but see \[Fass, 1988\]. That is, we have little insight into the semantic nature of adjectival predication, 
and even less into the semantics of nominals. Not until all major categories have been studied can we 
hope to arrive at a balanced understanding of the lexicon and the methods of composition. 
2. Methods in Lexical Semantics 
Given what I have said, let us examine the questions presented above in more detail. Because of space, 
I will have little to say concerning question (4) in this short note. First, let us turn to the issue of 
methodology. How can we determine the soundness of our method? Are new techniques available now 
that have not been adequately explored? Very briefly, we can summarize the most essential techniques 
assumed by the field, in some way, as follows (see, for example \[Cruse, 1986\]): 
1. On the basis of categorial distinctions, establish the fundamental differences between the grammatical 
classes; the typicial semantic behavior of a word of category X. 
2. Find distinctions between elements of a word class on the basis of collocation and cooccurrence tests. 
For example, "dog" and "rock" partition into different classes due to certain features. 
3. Test for distinctions of a grammatical nature on the basis of diathesis; i.e. alternations that are 
realized in the syntax. For example, break vs. cut in (i) and (ii) below \[Hale and Keyser, 1986\]. 
(i) a. The glass broke. 
b. John broke the glass. 
(ii) a. *The bread cut. 
b. John cut the bread. 
- xviii - 
This results in ever-finer distinctions in the semantic and syntactic behavior of verbs. 
4. Test for entailments in the word senses of a word, in different grammatical contexts. The same 
lexical item may carry different entailments in different contexts. For example, "forget" in (i): 
(i) a. John forgot that he locked the door. 
b. John forgot to lock the door. 
Sentence (a) has a factive interpretation of "forget" that (b) does not carry. 
5. Test for the ambiguity of a word. Distinguish between ambiguity and polysemy, (cf. \[Hirst, 1987\], 
\[Fass, 1988\]) and from the accidental nature and the logical nature of ambiguity. For example, the 
ambiguity between the two senses of "bank" in (i) 
and the polysemy in (ii). 
(i) a. the bank of the river 
b. the richest bank in the city 
(ii) a. The bank raised its interest rates yesterday. 
b. The store in next to the bank. 
6. Establish what the compositional nature of a lexical item is when applied to other words. For 
example, "alleged" vs. "tall" in the example below. 
(i) a. the alleged suspect 
b. the tall suspect 
While "tall" is a simple intersective modifier in (b) we must be aware of the intensional behavior of 
adjectives such as "alleged" in (a). 
This just briefly characterizes some of the techniques that have been useful for arriving at pre-theoretic 
notions of word meaning. What has changed over the years are not so much the methods themselves as 
the descriptive details provided by each test. One thing that has changed, however, --and this is 
significant-- is the way computational lexicography has provided stronger techniques and even new 
tools for lexical semantics research: for sense discrimination tasks \[Atldns 1987\]; for constructing 
concept taxonomies \[Amsler 1985, Atldns, Klavans and Boguraev, forthcoming\]; for establishing 
semantic relatedness among word senses \[Wilks et al, 1988\]; as well as for testing new ideas about 
semantic representations \[Boguraev and Pustejovsky, forthcoming\]. 
3. Descriptive Adequacy of Existing Representations 
Turning now to the question of how current theories compare with the coverage of lexical semantic 
data, there are two generalizations that should be made. First, the taxonomic descriptions that have been 
made of verb classes are far superior to the classifications available twenty years ago (see \[Levin, 1985\] 
for review). Using mainly the descriptive vocabulary of \[Talmy, 1975, 1985\] and \[Jackendoff, 1983\], 
fine and subtle distinctions are drawn that were impossible to capture in the earlier primitives-approach 
of \[Schank, 1972, 1975\] or the frame semantics of \[Fillmore, 1968\]. There are two problems with the 
current work, however. Unlike the theories of \[Wilks, 1975\] and \[Quillian, 1968\], there is no general 
coherent view on what the entire lexicon will look like when semantic structures for other major 
categories are studied. Furthermore, it is not clear whether this work embodies a real theory of 
knowledge representation. We can, however, view this research as the first step towards constructing a 
theory of lexical semantics which is integrated into a linguistic theory, as well as interpreted in a 
knowledge representation system. 
- xix - 
4. Explanatory Adequacy of Existing Representations 
Finally, let us turn to the question of whether current theories have changed the way we look at 
representation and lexicon design. The question here is whether the representations assumed by current 
theories are adequate to account for the richness of natural language semantics. It should be pointed out 
here that a theory of lexical meaning will affect the general design of our semantic theory in several 
ways. If we view the goal of a semantic theory as being able to recursively assign meanings to 
expressions, (accounting for phenomena such as synonymy, antonymy, polysemy, metonymy, etc.), then 
our view of compositionality depends ultimately on what the basic lexical categories of the language 
denote. Conventional wisdom on this point paints a picture of words behaving as either active functors 
or passive arguments \[Montague, 1974\]. But if we change the way which categories can denote, then 
the form of compositionality itself changes. Therefore, if done well, lexical semantics forces us to 
reevaluate the very nature of semantic composition in language (see, for example \[Keenan and Faltz, 
1985\]). 
In what ways could lexical semantics affect the larger methods of composition in semantics? I 
mentioned above that most of the careful representation work has been done on verb classes. In fact, 
the semantic weight in both lexical and compositional terms usually falls on the verb. This has obvious 
consequences for how to treat lexical ambiguity. For example, consider the verb "bake" in the two 
sentences below. 
(1) a. John baked the potato. 
b. John baked the cake. 
\[Atkins, Kegl, and Levin, 1988\] demonstrate that verbs such as "bake" are ambiguous, with both a 
"change-of-state" sense (la) and a "create" sense (lb). 
A similar ambiguity exists with verbs that allow the resulative construction, shown in (2) and (3), and 
discussed in \[Dowty, 1979\], \[Jackendoff, 1983\], and \[Levin and Rapoport, 1988\]. 
(2) a. Mary hammered the metal. 
b. Mary hammered the metal flat. 
(3) a. John wiped the table. 
b. John wiped the table clean. 
On many views, the verbs in (2) and (3) are ambiguous, related by either a lexical transformation 
\[Levin and Rapoport, 1988\], or a meaning postulate \[Dowty, 1979\]. In fact, given strict requirements on 
the way that a verb can project its lexical information, the verb "run" in (4) will also have two lexical 
entries, depending on the syntactic environment it selects \[Talmy, 1985\], \[Levin and Rappaport, 1989\]. 
(4) a. Mary ran yesterday. 
b. Mary ran to the store yesterday. 
These two verbs differ in their semantic representations, where the "run" in (4b) means "go-to-by- 
means-of-running", while in (4a) it means simply "move-by-running". 
The methodology described above for distinguishing word senses is also assumed by those working in 
more formal frameworks. For example, \[Dowty, 1985\] proposes multiple entries for control and raising 
verbs, and establishes their semantic equivalence with the use of meaning postulates. That is, the verbs 
in (5) and (6) are lexically distinct but semantically related by rules. 
(5) a. It seems that John likes Mary. 
b. John seems to like Mary. 
- XX - 
(6) a. Mary prefers that she come. 
b. Mary prefers to come. 
Given the conventional notions of function application and compositionality, there is little choice but to 
treat all of the above cases as polysemous verbs. Yet, something about the systematicity of such 
ambiguity suggests that a more general, simpler explanation should be possible. By relaxing the 
conditions on how the meaning of a complex expression is derived from its parts, we can, in fact, arrive 
at a very straightforward explanation for cases of "logical polysemy." 
The basic idea is this. Rather than treating the expressions that behave as arguments to a function as 
simple, passive objects, imagine that they are as active in the semantics as the verb itself. The product 
of function application would be sensitive to both the function and its active argument. Something like 
this is suggested in \[Keenan and Faltz, 1985\], as the "Meaning-Form Correlation Principle." 
What I have in mind can best be illustrated by returning to the examples in (1). Rather than having 
two word senses for a verb such as "bake," suppose there is simply one, a "change-of-state." Now, 
assume that "bake" can be lexically specified as a Process verb \[Pustejovsky, 1988\]. It is a general 
property of Processes, that they can shift their "aspectual type" to become a telic event. For example, 
"push the wagon" can shift from a Process to a Transition ("push the wagon to Mary") by general 
principles of event composition (cf. \[Pustejovsky, 1988\]). Assume further, that our semantic theory 
makes a logical distinction between "potatoes" and "cakes" in terms of natural versus artifactual objects. 
Any artifact can be identified with the state of being that object, along with the purpose of the object, 
and other information. Most importantly, however, an artifact has a kind of stative interpretation as part 
of its meaning. 
Notice that the two senses for "bake" in (1) are the result of compositionality in a richer sense. For 
observe that the "create" sense arises by the same principle of event composition mentioned above. 
Namely, that there is a baking process, and it results in a cake. This is the "create" sense, and it is 
present just in those cases where an artifactual stative is already encoded in the argument (see 
\[Pustejovsky, 1989\] for details). 
In fact, similar principles seem to be operating in the examples mentioned in (2) through (4); namely, 
systematic ambiguity is the result of principles of semantic composition, rather than lexical ambiguity. I 
will call this particular kind of case "cocompositionality." 
In explaining the behavior of the systematic ambiguity above, I made reference to properties of the 
Noun Phrase that are not typical semantic properties for nouns in linguistics, e.g. artifact, natural kind. 
In \[Pustejovsky, 1989\] and \[Pustejovsky and Anick, 1988\], I suggest that there is a system of relations 
that characterizes the semantics of nominals, very much like the argument structure of a verb. I call this 
the "Qualia Structure", adopting a term from \[Goodman, 1951\]. Essentially, the qualia structure of a 
noun determines its meaning as much as the list of arguments determines a verb's meaning. The 
elements that make up a qualia structure include notions such as "container," "space," "surface," 
"figure," "artifact," and so on. 
When we combine the qualia structure of a NP with the argument structure of a verb, we begin to see a 
richer notion of compositionality emerging, one that looks very much like object-oriented approaches to 
programming \[Ingria and Pustejovsky, 1988\]. As an example, consider the two senses of "window" and 
"door" in (7) and (8) below: 
(7) a. John crawled through the window. 
b. The window is closed. 
(8) a. Mary painted the door. 
b. Mary walked through the door. 
¢ 
- xxi - 
Each noun appears to have two senses: an object denotation, and a portal denotation. We can 
characterize the meaning of such "Double Figure Ground" nominals as a three place relation, roughly 
something like N(Figure,Invert-Figure, Ground), where Figure refers to the artifact itself, Invert-Figure 
refers to the portal, and Ground is a reference constant. The foregrounding or backgrounding of a 
nominal's qualia is very similar to argument structure-changing operations for verbs. That is, in (Sa) 
"paint" applies to the Figure interpretation of "the door," while in (8b), "through" will apply to the 
Invert-Figure interpretation of the same NP. The ambiguity with such nouns is a logical one, one that is 
intimately linked to the semantic representation of the object itself. The qualia structure is a way of 
capturing this fact. 
Having discussed the notion of logical polysemy, let us conclude our brief discussion of lexical 
semantics with the issue of metonymy. Metonymy, where a subpart or related part of an object 
"stands" for the object itself, also poses a problem for standard denotational theories of semantics. For 
example, how can we account for the reference shifts such as those shown in (9)? 
(9) a. Thatcher vetoed the channel tunnel. 
b. Mary enjoyed the book. 
I suggest that these are cases of semantic "type coercion", where the verb has coerced the meaning of a 
term phrase into a different semantic type. In the case of (9a), it is obvious that what is vetoed is some 
proposal relating to the object. In (9b), the book is enjoyed only by virtue of some event or process that 
involves the book, performed by Mary. It might furthermore be reasonable to assume that the qualia 
structure of "book" specifies what the artifact is used for; i.e. reading. Such coercion results in a word 
sense for the NP that I will call "logical metonymy." Roughly, logical metonymy is where a logical 
argument of a semantic type (selected by a function) denotes the semantic type itself. For details see 
\[Pustejovsky, 1989\]. 
Another interesting example involves the possible subjects of causative verbs. These are also cases of 
logical metonymy. Consider the sentences in (10) and (11). 
(10) a. The pictures of himself frightened John. 
b. A cup of coffee in the morning woke John up. 
(11) a. John killed Mary. 
b. The gun killed Mary. 
c. John's stupidity killed Mary. 
d. The war killed Mary. 
e. John's pulling the trigger killed Mary. 
The sentences in (10) illusffate the various syntactic consequences of metonymy and coercion involving 
experiencer verbs, while those in (11) show the different "metonymic extensions" possible from the 
causing event in a killing. The generalization here is that when a verb selects an event as one of its 
arguments, type coercion to an event will permit a limited range of logical metonymy. 
5. Conclusion 
In this paper I have tried to cover what I believe are currently some of the most interesting issues in 
lexical semantics. I have also tried to outline an approach to meaning where the semantic load is 
spread more evenly throughout the lexicon. This entails a semantic description of noun classes, termed 
a "theory of Qualia," as well as the rules of composition that allow this information to be incorporated 
into the semantic interpretation of larger expressions. Although much of what I have presented is 
incomplete and somewhat programmatic, I firmly believe this approach can help clarify the nature of 
word meaning and compositionality in natural language. 
- xxii - 
Acknowledgements 
I would like to thank Dan Fass for lengthy discussion on many of the issues mentioned here. I would 
also like to thank Branimir Boguraev and Robert Ingria for useful comments. Any errors, of course, are 
my own. 
References 
\[Amsler, 1980\] 
Amsler, Robert, The Structure of the Merriam-Webster Pocket Dictionary. Ph.D dissertation, 1980. 
\[Atkins, 1987\] 
Atkins, Beryl T, "Semantic ID Tags: Corpus Evidence for Dictionary Senses," in the Proceedings of 
3rd Annual Conference at U. Waterloo, Center for the New OED, pgs.17-36, 1987. 
\[Atkins et al, 1988\] 
Atkins, Beryl, Judy Kegl, and Beth Levin, "Anatomy of a Verb Entry", Journal of Lexicographic 
Research 1, 1988. 
\[Atkins et al, forthcoming\] 
Atkins, Beryl, Judith Klavans, 
forthcoming. 
and Bran Boguraev, "Semantic Verb Clusters from MRDs", 
\[Boguraev and Pustejovsky, forthcoming\] 
Boguraev, Bran and James Pustejovsky, "Knowledge Representation and Computational Lexicons," to 
appear in Zampolli and Calzolari, Towards a Lexicographer's Workstation, Oxford University Press. 
\[Cruse, 1986\] 
Cruse, D. A., Lexical Semantics, Cambridge University Press, 1986. 
\[Dowty, 1979\] 
Dowty, David R., Word Meaning and Montague Grammar, D. Reidel, Dordrecht, Holland, 1979. 
\[Dowty, 1985\] 
Dowty, David R., "On Some Recent Analyses of Control," 
1985. 
Linguistics and Philosophy 8, pp. 1-41, 
\[Fass, 1988\] 
Fass, Dan, "Collative Semantics: A Semantics for Natural Language Processing," MCCS-99-118, 
Computing Research Laboratory, New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, New Mexico, 1988. 
\[Fillmore, 1968\] 
Fillmore, Charles, "The Case for Case", in Universals in Linguistic Theory, E. Bach and R. Harms 
(eds.). New York, Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1968. 
\[Goodman, 1951\] 
Goodman, Nelson, The Structure of Appearance, Reidel Publishing, Dordrecht, 1951. 
\[Grimshaw, 1981\] 
Grimshaw, Jane, "Complement Selection and the Lexicon" Linguistic Inquiry, 1979. 
,.. 
- XX111 - 
\[Gruber, 1965\] 
Gruber, Jeffrey, Studies in Lexical Relations, MIT PhD, 1965 
\[Hale and Keyser, 1986\] 
Hale, Ken and S.J. geyser, "Some Transitivity Alternations in English," Lexicon Project Working 
Papers 7, Center for Cognitive Science, MIT, Cambridge, MA. 
\[I-Iirst, 1987\] 
Hirst, Graeme, Semantic Interpretation and the Resolution of Ambiguity, Cambridge University Press, 
Cambridge, 1987. 
\[Hobbs, 1987\] 
Hobbs, Jerry, "World Knowledge and Word Meaning," 
New Mexico, January, 1987. 
in Proceedings of TINLAP-3, Las Cruces, 
\[Ingria and Pustejovsky, 1988\] 
Ingria, Robert and James Pustejovsky, "Active Objects in Syntax and Semantics," ms. BBN and 
Brandeis University, 1988. 
\[Jackendoff, 1972\] 
Jackendoff, Ray, Semantic Interpretation in Generative Grammar, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. 1972. 
\[Jackendoff, 1983\] 
Jackendoff, Ray, Semantics and Cognition, MIT Press, Cambridge. 
\[Keenan and Faltz, 1985\] 
Keenan, Edward, and Leonard Faltz, Boolean Semantics for Natural Language, Reidel Publishing, 
Dordrecht, 1985. 
\[Levin, 1985\] 
Levin, Beth, (ed) "Lexical Semantics in Review," Lexicon Project Working Papers Number 1, MIT, 
1985. 
\[Levin and Rapoport, 1988\] 
Beth Levin and T.R. Rapoport, "Lexical Subordination," CLS 24, 275-289. 
\[Levin and Rappaport, 1986\] 
Levin, Beth and Malka Rappaport, "The Formation of Adjectival Passives", Linguistic Inquiry, 17.4, 
1986. 
\[Montague, 1974\] 
Montague, Richard, Formal Philosophy, New Haven, Yale University Press. 
\[Quillian, 1968\] 
Quillian, M. Ross, "Semantic Memory," 
Cambridge, MA. MIT Press, 1968. 
in M. Minsky (ed) Semantic Information Processing, 
\[pustejovsky, 1988\] 
Pustejovsky, James, "Event Semantic 
University, Waltham, MA. 1988. 
Structure," Computer Science Technical Report, Brandeis 
\[pustejovsky, 1989\] 
Pustejovsky, James, "Type Coercion and Selection," to appear in Proceedings of West Coast Conference 
on Formal Linguistics, Vancouver, 1989. 
- xxiv - 
\[-Pustejovsky and Anick, 1988\] 
Pustejovsky, James and Peter Anick, "On The Semantic Interpretation of Nominals", in Proceedings 
of COLING-1988, Budapest, 1988. 
\[Scha, 1983\] 
Scha, Rernko J. H., "Logical Foundations for Question Answering," MS 12.331 Philips Research 
Laboratories, Eindhoven, the Netherlands, 1983. 
\[Schank, 1975\] 
Schank, Roger, Conceptual Information Processing, Amsterdam, North-Holland, 1975. 
\[Talmy, 1975\] 
Talmy, Len, "Semantics and Syntax of Motion," in J.P. Kimball (ed), Syntax and Semantics 4, 
Academic Press, New York, 1975. 
\[Talmy, 1985\] 
Talmy, Len, "Lexicalization Patterns", in 
Timothy (Ed.), Cambridge, 1985. 
Language Typology and Syntactic Description, Shopen, 
\[Walker, 1986\] 
Walker, Donald, "Knowledge Resource tools for Accessing Large Text Files", Artificial Intelligence 
and Information Science research, TR. 85-21233-25, 1986. 
\[Wilks, 1975\] 
Wilks, Yorick, "Preference Semantics," in Formal Semantics of Natural Language, Keenan, E. (ed.), 
Cambridge University Press, 1975. 
\[Wilks et al, 1988\] 
Wilks, Yorick, Dan Fass, Cheng-Ming Guo, James McDonald, Tony Plate, Brian Slator, "A Tractable 
Machine Dictionary as a Resource for Computational Semantics," in Bran Boguraev and Ted Briscoe 
(eds) Computational Lexicography for Natural Language Processing, Harlow, Essex, Longman. 
- XXV - 

