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<Paper uid="C92-4184">
  <Title>JAUNT: A Constraint Solver for Disjunctive Feature Structures</Title>
  <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1. Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Certain natural language constructs, such as PP: attachnmnt in English, are known to have a combinatorial number of syntactic parses (Church &amp; Patil 1988). For example, sentence (1) has 14 (= Catalan(4)) dif= ferent parses because of the three consecutiw~ PPs: Put the block on t}m floor on the table in the room. (1) Representing the set of parses in a compact way and extracting a correct parse by using such knowledge as A block cannot be on a thmr and on a table at the same time are keys to a practical natural language system.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> The parsing method of Constraint Dependency Grammar (Maruyama 1990) axldressed exactly these issues. The essential ideas were * to represent the set of parses by a constraint network, which is emnposed of a set of explicit, vahm disjunctions and constraints imposed on them, * to apply constraint propagation in order to kee I) the constraint network locally consistent, and * to dynamically add new constraints for disambiguation. null In this paper, we describe a programming tool named JAUNT that embodies the above ideas.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> JAUNT is a constraint solver for disjmmtive feature structure% whose constraint satisfaction mechanisms are constraint propagation and forwar~l checking. In the next secthm, we show \]tow various ambiguities are represented in our explicit vahm disjunction + constraints scheme. The constraint satisfaction algorithnls</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> adapted in JAUNT are explained in Section 3. Section 4 describes the rise /)f JAUNT's recta-inference capability. Section 5 concludes the paper.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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