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<Paper uid="P94-1043">
  <Title>REAPING THE BENEFITS OF INTERACTIVE SYNTAX AND SEMANTICS*</Title>
  <Section position="3" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
INTRODUCTION
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> The focus of investigation in language processing research has moved away from the issue of semantic feedback to syntactic processing primarily due to the difficulty of getting the communication between syntax and semantics to work in a clean and systematic way. However, it is unquestionable that semantics does in fact provide useful information which when fed back to syntax could help eliminate many an alternative syntactic structure. In this article, I address three issues in the communication mechanism between syntax and semantics and provide a complete and promising solution to the problem of interactive syntactic and semantic processing.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Since natural languages are replete with ambiguities at all levels, it appears intuitively that a processor with incremental interaction between the levels of syntax and semantics which makes the best and immediate use of both syntactic and semantic information to eliminate many alternatives would win over either a syntax-first or a semantics-first mechanism. In order to devise such an interactive mechanism, one has to address three important issues in the communication: (a) When to communicate: at what points should syntax and semantics interact, (b) What to communicate: what and how *The author would like to thank his advisor Dr.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> Kurt Eiselt and his colleague Justin Peterson for their support and valuable comments on this work.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> much information should they exchange, and (c) How to agree: how to resolve any conflicting preferences between syntax and semantics.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> In this article, I propose (a) a particular variant of left-corner parsing that I call Head-Signaled Left Corner Parsing (HSLC) to define the points where syntax and semantics should interact, (b) an account of grammatical relations based on thematic roles as a medium for communication, and (c) a simple strategy based on syntactic and semantic preferences for resolving conflicts in the communication. These solutions were motivated from an analysis of a large body of psycholinguistic data and account for a greater variety of experimental observations on how humans deal with structural and lexical ambiguities than previous models (Eiselt et al, 1993). While it also appears that the proposed interaction with semantics could make improvements to the efficiency of the parser in dealing with real texts, such a conclusion can only be drawn after an empirical evaluation.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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