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<Paper uid="P90-1007">
  <Title>TRANSFORMING SYNTACTIC GRAPHS INTO SEMANTIC GRAPHS* Hae-Chang Rim</Title>
  <Section position="3" start_page="0" end_page="47" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
INTRODUCTION
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> In computing meaning representations from natural language, ambiguities arise at each level. Some word sense ambiguities are resolved by syntax while others depend on the context of discourse. Sometimes, syntactic ambiguities are resolved during semantic processing, but often remain even through coherence analysis at the discourse level. Finally, after syntactic, semantic, and discourse processing, the resulting meaning structure may still have multiple interpretations.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> For example, a news item from Associated Press, November 22, 1989, quoted a rescued hostage, &amp;quot;The foreigners were taken to the Estado Mayor, army headquarters. I left that hotel about quarter to one, and by the *This work is sponsored by the Army Research Office under contract DAAG29-84-K-0060.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2">  time I got here in my room at quarter to 4 and turned on CNN, I saw myself on TV getting into the little tank,&amp;quot; Blood said.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> The article was datelined, Albuquerque N.M. A first reading suggested that Mr. Blood had been flown to Albuquerque, but further thought suggested that &amp;quot;here in my room&amp;quot; probably referred to some sleeping section in the army headquarters. But despite the guess, ambiguity remains.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> In a previous paper \[Seo and Simmons 1989\] we argued that a syntactic graph -- the union of all parse trees -- was a superior representation for further semantic processing. It is a concise list of syntactically labeled triples, supported by an exclusion matrix to show what pairs of triples are incompatible. It is an easily accessible representation that provides succeeding semantic and discourse processes with complete information from the syntactic analysis. Here, we present methods for transforming the syntactic graph to a functional graph (one using syntactic functions, SUB-JECT, OBJECT, IOBJECT etc.) and for transforming the functional graph to a semantic graph of case relations.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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