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<Paper uid="C02-1043">
  <Title>Computation of modifier scope in NP by a language-neutral method</Title>
  <Section position="3" start_page="1" end_page="1" type="relat">
    <SectionTitle>
3 Related work
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Copestake et al. (1995) briefly address the issue of adjective scope in an NP such as a fierce black cat.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Since both adjectives are intersecting in this case, their relative scope is semantically irrelevant (a black fierce cat, though infelicitous, would mean the same thing). Since a translation of this NP might have a different structure, e.g. Spanish gato feroz y negro lit. 'cat fierce and black', Copestake et al. argue that the logical form (LF) for such an NP ought to be flattened (i.e., no scope assigned to the adjectives), so as to ensure that the NP and its translation do not have syntactically different LFs, which is required for system-internal reasons.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> If this conclusion is justified, it poses a problem for the approach taken in this paper, since (II) assigns wider scope to fierce. Most dictionaries do not mark adjectives according to whether they are intersecting or not, nor do we know of any large corpora that are annotated in this way; therefore, it seems unlikely that (II) could be reliably turned off just in those cases where scope assignment is logically unnecessary.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> Copestake et al.'s conclusion is based on the system-internal assumption that transfer-based MT requires the LF of the input (e.g. gato feroz y negro) to have the same syntactic structure as the LF of the output (e.g. fierce black cat). However, a transfer-based MT system in which transfer rules are learned from aligned corpora, such as described by Richardson et al. (2001), does not have this requirement; hence the problem Copestake et al. discuss does not arise.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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