<?xml version="1.0" standalone="yes"?>
<Paper uid="P05-3003">
  <Title>Efficient solving and exploration of scope ambiguities</Title>
  <Section position="5" start_page="11" end_page="11" type="concl">
    <SectionTitle>
3 Conclusion
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> We have presented utool, a tool that supports a variety of operations related to scope underspecification. It is the most efficient solver for underspecification available today, and provides functionality for counting readings, testing whether a description is a net, and converting between different underspecification formalisms. It collects the results of several years of formal and computational research on dominance graphs into one convenient system.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> The most obvious use of utool is the enumeration of readings of underspecified descriptions produced by large-scale grammars. This means that a user can realistically map the semantic output of these grammars into actual semantic representations. However, the tool is also useful for developers of such grammars. It can be used to count and explore the readings of the underspecified descriptions the grammar computes, and has already been used in the debugging of the syntax-semantics interface of the ERG (Flickinger et al., 2005).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> From a more general perspective, the real appeal of underspecification is that it could allow us to eliminate readings that contradict the context or our world knowledge, without having to enumerate these readings first. Such inferences could already take place on the level of the underspecified description (Koller and Niehren, 2000). But the new chart data structure that utool computes is a more explicit packed representation of the possible readings, and still relatively small in practice. Thus it could open up avenues for more theoretical future research as well.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
class="xml-element"></Paper>