Incrementally interpreting wh-questions using typelogical grammars

Abstract

Incremental interpretation is a field that is concerned with building semantic terms of natural lan- guage sentences word-by-word from left-to-right. This field could be very relevant for linguistics and artificial intelligence as psycholinguistic evidence has pointed out that humans most likely interpret language incrementally. This thesis is focused upon the incremental interpretation of questions that start with wh-phrases, such as "who", "what" and "which", i.e. wh-questions. As a framework for interpretation, a non-associative typelogical grammar is used that makes use of controlled associativity and reordering. This is a strongly lexicalised formalism, where every word is assigned a type and semantic term depending on the context that they occur in. On top of the typelogical grammar, the system M due to Moortgat [1988] is used. This system combines any two types of the grammar, including types for wh-phrases, to a single type. The semantic terms at each point also follow from this system. For our purposes, M is translated to a system M_diamond that accommodates controlled associativity and reordering. M_diamond is consequently used within an incremental interpretation algorithm and restricted it to always take the first two types of a wh-question as input. This results in incremental interpretation of wh-questions.