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<Paper uid="P98-1072">
  <Title>Semantic-Head Based Resolution of Scopal Ambiguities*</Title>
  <Section position="3" start_page="0" end_page="433" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Scopal ambiguities are problematic for language processing systems; resolving them might lead to combinatorial explosion. In applications like transfer-based machine translation, resolution can be avoided if transfer takes place at a representational level encoding scopal ambiguities.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> The key idea is to have a common representation for all the possible interpretations of an ambiguous expression, as in Alshawi et al. (1991).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> Scopal ambiguities in the source language can then carry over to the target language. Recent research has termed this underspecification (see e.g., KSnig and Reyle (1997), Pinkal (1996)).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> A problem with underspecification is, however, that structural restrictions are not encoded. Clear scope configurations (preferences) in the source language are easily lost:  (1) das paflt auch nicht that fits also not 'that does not fit either' (2) ich kanni sie nicht verstehen ~i I can you not understand 'I cannot understand you' * This work was funded by BMBF (German Federal Ministry of Education, Science, Research, and Technology) grant 01 IV 101 R. Thanks to Christian Lieske, Scott McGlashan, Yoshiki Mori, Manfred Pinkal, CJ Rupp, and Karsten Worm for many useful discussions.  In (1) the focus particle 'auch' outscopes the negation 'nicht'. The preferred reading in (2) is the one where 'nicht' has scope over the modal 'kann'. In both cases, the syntactic configurational information for German supports the preferred scoping: the operator with the widest scope is c-commanding the operator with narrow scope. Preserving the suggested scope resolution restrictions from the source language would be necessary for a correct interpretation. However, the configurational restrictions do not easily carry over to English; there is no verb movement in the English sentence of (2), so 'not' does not c-command 'can' in this case.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> In this paper we focus on the underspecification of scope introduced by quantifying noun phrases, adverbs, and particles. The representations we will use resembles Underspecified Discourse Representation Structures (Reyle, 1993) and Hole Semantics (Bos, 1996).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"> Our Underspecified Semantic Representation, USR, is introduced in Section 2. Section 3 shows how USRs are built up in a compositional semantics. Section 4 is the main part of the paper. It introduces an algorithm in which structural constraints are used to resolve underspecified scope in USR structures. Section 5 describes an implementation of the algorithm and evaluates how well it fares on real dialogue examples.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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