Description Theory, LTAGs and Underspecified Semantics

Abstract

An attractive way to model the relation between an underspecified syntactic representation and its completions is to let the underspecified representation correspond to a logical description and the completions to the models of that description. This approach, which underlies the Description Theory of (Marcus et al. 1983) has been integrated in (Vijay-Shanker 1992) with a pure unification approach to Lexicalized Tree-Adjoining Grammars (Joshi et al.\ 1975, Schabes 1990). We generalize Description Theory by integrating semantic information, that is, we propose to tackle both syntactic and semantic underspecification using descriptions.