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<Paper uid="P89-1020">
  <Title>A General Computational Treatment Of The Comparative</Title>
  <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="161" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Recently there has been interest in the development of a general computational treatment of the comparative. Last year at the Annual ACL Meeting, two papers were presented on the comparative by Ballard \[1\] and Rayner and Banks \[14\]. Previous to that a comprehensive treatment of the comparative was incorporated into the syntactic analyzer of the Linguistic String Project \[15\]; in addition the DIALOGIC grammar utilized by TEAM \[9\] also contains some coverage of the comparative. null An interest in the comparative is not surprising because it occurs regularly in lan*This work was supported by the Defense Advanced Re.arch Projects Agency under Contract N00014-8.5-K-0163 from the Office of Naval Research. The author's current addrC/~ is: Center for Medical Infornmti~, Columhia~Pre~byterian Medical Center, Columbia University, 161 Fort Waahington Avenue, Room 1310, New York NY 10032.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> guage, and yet is a very difficult structure to process by computer. Because it can occur in a variety of forms pervasively throughout the grammar, its incorporation into a NL system is a major undertaking which can easily render the system unwieldy. We will describe an approach to the computational treatment of the comparative, which provides more general coverage of the comparative than that of other NLP Systems while not obscuring the underlying system. This is accomplished by associating the comparative with simpler, more basic linguistic entities so that it could be processed by the system with only minor modifications.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> The implementation of the comparative described in this paper was done for the Pro-</Paragraph>
    <Section position="1" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="sub_section">
      <SectionTitle>
re,8 Question Answering System \[8\] 1 (referred
</SectionTitle>
      <Paragraph position="0"> to hereafter as Proteus QAS), and should be adaptable for other systems which have similar modules. A more detailed discussion of this work is given in \[7\].</Paragraph>
    </Section>
    <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="161" type="sub_section">
      <SectionTitle>
1.1 The Problem
</SectionTitle>
      <Paragraph position="0"> The comparative is a difficult structure to process for both syntactic and semantic reasons.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="1"> Syntactically the comparative is extraordinarily diverse. The following sentences illustrate a range of different types of comparative structures, some of which resemble other English structures, as noted by Sager \[15\]. In the examples below, sentences with the comparative that resemble other forms are followed by a 1 The treatment of the comp~'ative in the syntactic analysis component was adapted from a previous implementation done by this 8uthor for the Linguistic String Project \[15\].</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="2">  sentence illustrating the similar form: conjunction-like : la.Men eat more apples than oranges.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="3"> lb.Men eat apples and oranges.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="4">  The problems in covering the syntax of the comparative are therefore at least as complex as the problems encountered for general coordinate conjunctions, relative clauses, and certain subordinate and adverbial clauses. Incorporating conjunction-like comparatives into a grammar is particularly difficult because that structure can occur almost anywhere in the grammar. Wh-relative-clause-like comparatives are complicated because they contain an omitted noun where the omission can occur arbitrarily deep within the comparative clause.</Paragraph>
      <Paragraph position="5"> The comparative is difficult to process for semantic reasons also because the comparative marker can occur on different linguistic categories. Adjectives, quantifiers, and adverbs can all take the comparative form, as in: he is taller than John, he took more courses than John, and he ran faster than John. Therefore the semantics of the comparative has to be consistent with the semantics of different linguistic categories while retaining its own unique characteristics.</Paragraph>
    </Section>
  </Section>
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