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<Paper uid="C86-1156">
  <Title>Discourse, anaphora and parsing</Title>
  <Section position="6" start_page="674" end_page="674" type="concl">
    <SectionTitle>
6. Conclusion
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> The declarative reformulation of DRS theory proposed here is relatively faithful to Kamp's original formulation, but has the advantage that it inherits a fully specified declarative and procednral semantics from the underlying Prolog system. It emphasises tlle view that expressions of the language can be viewed as relations between preceding and following contexts, and shows how these relations can be specified in a formally precise way.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> This model opens up several important questions. Kamp showed that the treatment of anaphorie dependencies, normally viewed as a left to right phenomenon, can be integrated with the treatment of the &amp;quot;conventional&amp;quot; truth-conditional semantics of clauses: we have shown that both of these can be integrated into an extended unification-based model of grammar. This integration allows one to be precise about the nature of the syntax/semantics/discourse interface(s), and also allows experimentation with respect to the analysis of specific linguistic phenomena. For example, in our larger grammar (not presented here) we capture strong and weak cross-over phenomena by introducing the reference marker associated with a relative clause NP when the corresponding gap is reached. We are thus analysing what is usually thought of as a syntactic phenomenon in terms of the accessibility of reference markers, a discourse property.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> From a computational point of view, there is a delicate interaction between the specific rules adopted in declarative formulation of the theory and the &amp;quot;power&amp;quot; of the inference procedure needed to determine the well-formedness of a partitular utterance with respect to them. The top-down left-to-right inference procedure inherited from Prolog suffices for the grammar presented here, but one can easily write grammars in PrAtt for which this inference procedure may fail to terminate. We are investigating other inference procedures, such as Earley Deduction (Pereira and Warren 1983) and Left Corner parsing to see if they have better termination properties. Essentially, the problem is one of arranging the equations in the grammar to be applied in an order such that the search space is finite: thus research on various coroutining strategies, such as the use of the freeze predicate is relevant here.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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