<?xml version="1.0" standalone="yes"?>
<Paper uid="C94-2152">
  <Title>Hypothesis Scoring over Theta Grids Information in Parsing Chinese Sentences with Serial Verb Constructions</Title>
  <Section position="2" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> in Mandarin Chincse, it is common that there are two or more verbs in a sentence without any marker indicating the relationships between them. Such peculiar construct is called Serial verb constructions (SVCs) \[Li and Thompson 1981\]. For example, in the sentence: &amp;quot;~ ~~ ),~,~- ~(~&amp;quot; (the defendant hol~ ~laintiff ~) (The defendant hoped that the plaintiff could forgive him.), there are two verbs: &amp;quot;~-~&amp;quot; (hope) and &amp;quot;~ &amp;quot; (forgive); however, there are no such markers as subordination markers, conjunctions, preposition, or other morphological cues, which indicate the relationships between them. In developing a parser, SVCs cause considerable problems. We have designed a modified chart parser using theta grids information. In parsing sentences with SVCs, different verbs will compete in searching the chart for their own theta roles.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Thus, some mechanism for arbitrating among the competing verbs for the ownership of each constituent in the chart must be designed. The theta grid chart parser is to be described in the next section.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> The study of SVCs is still primitive. Most previous work lChang and Knflee 1991\] \[Yeh and Lee 1992\] were based on Li and Thompson's classification of SVCs \[Li and Thompson 1981\]. Surveying their work, we find there are some limitations. Yang \[19871 and Chang ct al.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> \[Chang and Krulee 1991\] dealt with only subsets of SVCs. Moreover, it is not clear how the implementations of Yang \[1987\], Chang et al. \[Chang and Krulce 1991\], and Yeh et al. \[Yeh and Lee 1992\] can be extended to handle long SVCs, i.e., those sentences containing more than two occurrences of verbs. It is because their work were based on the classification of SVCs, and the classification was based on two-verbs cases only. Pun \[19911 claimed that his work could handle long SVCs; however, did not report how to systematically extend his method to SVCs with three or more verbs. In our model, there are three characteristics: First, instead of classifying SVCs into several types, we make use of a numerical scoring function to determine a prcferred structure. It is an attempt to make the SVCs handling process more ,systematic. The information encoded in theta grids are used as bases for scoring. Second, it can handle long SVCs. Third, category, ambiguities can be taken into consideration at the same time. Namely, we can simultaneously determine whether a verb candidate actually plays a vclb or not. While in previous work, before the SVC handling processes are triggcred, it must determine the actual verbs in the sentence.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> This work is part of our long-term research for building a natural language front-end of a verdict understanding system. Thus, the corpora we use are judicial verdict documents from the Kaohsiuug district court lTaiwan 1990a\]\[Taiwan 1990b\], which were written in a special official-document style. Thus, our analysis is based on such kind of sub-language.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
class="xml-element"></Paper>