1994/07/20 by Beryl Hoffman, Hoffman, Beryl
Computer Science · #Computation and Language (cs.CL) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Natural Language Processing Techniques #Speech and dialogue systems #cmp-lg #cs.CL
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.cmp-lg/9407017
10 pages, uuencoded compressed postscript file, appears in the Proceedings of the 7th International Generation Workshop
arxiv created 1994/07/20 · openalex publication_date 1994/07/20 · arxiv updated 2009/11/30 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Turkish has considerably freer word order than English. The interpretations of different word orders in Turkish rely on information that describes how a sentence relates to its discourse context. To capture the syntactic features of a free word order language, I present an adaptation of Combinatory Categorial Grammars called -CCGs (set-CCGs). In -CCGs, a verb's subcategorization requirements are relaxed so that it requires a set of arguments without specifying their linear order. I integrate a level of information structure, representing pragmatic functions such as topic and focus, with -CCGs to allow certain pragmatic distinctions in meaning to influence the word order of a sentence in a compositional way. Finally, I discuss how this strategy is used within an implemented generation system which produces Turkish sentences with context-appropriate word orders in a simple database query task.