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<Paper uid="P93-1044">
  <Title>Guiding an HPSG Parser using Semantic and Pragmatic Expectations</Title>
  <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
INTRODUCTION
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> The use of purely syntactic knowledge during the parse phase of natural language understanding yields considerable local ambiguity (consideration of impossible subeonstituents) as well global ambiguity (construction of syntactically valid parses not applicable to the socio-pragmatic context).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> This research investigates bringing socio-pragmatic knowledge to bear during the parse, while maintaining a domain independent grammar and parser. The particular technique explored uses knowledge about the pragmatic context to order the consideration of proposed parse constituents, thus guiding the parser to consider the best (wrt the expectations) solutions first. Such a search may be classified as a best-first search.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> The theoretical models used to represent the pragmatic knowledge in this study are based on Halliday's Systemic Grammar and a model of the pragmatics of conversation. The model used to represent the syntax and domain independent semantic knowledge is HPSG - Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
class="xml-element"></Paper>