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<Paper uid="P97-1050">
  <Title>Efficient Construction of Underspecified Semantics under Massive Ambiguity</Title>
  <Section position="8" start_page="392" end_page="392" type="concl">
    <SectionTitle>
6 Discussion
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Our algorithm and its implementation show that it is not only possible in theory, but also feasible in practice to construct packed semantical representations directly from parse forests for sentence that exhibit massive syntactic ambiguity. The algorithm is both in asymptotic complexity and in real numbers dramatically faster than an earlier approach, that also tries to provide an underspecified semantics for syntactic ambiguities. The algorithm has been presented abstractly from the actual constraint system and can be 2dapted to any constraint-based grammar formalism.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> A critical assumption for the method has been that semantic rules never fail, i.e., no search is involved in semantics construction. This is required to guarantee that the resulting constraint is a kind of 'solved form' actually representing so-to-speak the free combination of choices it contains. Nevertheless, our method (modulo small changes to handle failure) may still prove useful, when this restriction is not fulfilled, since it focuses on computing the common information of disjunctive branches. The conjunctive part of the output constraint of the algorithm can then be seen as an approximation of the actual result, if the output constraint is satisfiable. Moreover, the disjunctive parts are reduced, so that a subsequent full-fledged search will have considerably less work than when directly trying to solve the original constraint system.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
class="xml-element"></Paper>