• Language and Information
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• v.20 no.1
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• pp.25-49
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• 2016

Honorific forms express the speaker's social attitude to others and also indicate the social ranks and level of intimacy of the participants in the discourse. In a cross-linguistic perspective of grammar engineering, modelling honorification has been regarded as a key strategy for improving language processing applications. Using the HPSG and MRS formalism, this article provides a multilingual grammar model of honorification. The present study incorporates the honorific information into the Meaning Representation System (MRS) via Individual Constraints (ICONS), and then conducts an evaluation to see if the model contributes to semantics-based language processing.

• Language and Information
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• v.2 no.1
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• pp.1-41
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• 1998

Evaluation of multilingual translation fundamentally involves measurement of meaning equivalences between the formally mapped discourses/texts of SL(source language) and TL(target language) both represented by a metalanguage called IL(interlingua). Unlike a usaal uni-directional MT(machine translation) model(e.g.:SL $\rightarrow$ analysis $\rightarrow$ transfer $\rightarrow$ generation $\rightarrow$ TL), a bi-directional(by 'negotiation') model(i.e.: SL $\rightarrow$ IL/S $\leftrightarrow$ IL $\leftrightarrow$ IL/T \leftarrow TL) is proposed here for the purpose of evaluating multilingual, not merely bilingual, translation. The IL, as conceived of in this study, is an English-based predicate logic represented in the framework of MRS(minimal recursion semantics), an MT-oriented off-shoot of HPSG(Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar). In addition, a list of semantic and pragmatic checkpoints are set up, some being optional depending on the kind and use of the translation, so sa to have the evaluation of translation fine-grained by computing matching or mismatching of such checkpoints.

• Language and Information
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• v.18 no.2
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• pp.1-29
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• 2014

Relativization is one of the common syntactic operations to merge two different clauses into a single information unit. This operation plays a pivotal role to structuralize multiple clauses cohesively as well as serves to specify the property an individual has within the context. That implies that relativization contributes to information structure of multiclausal sentences. In this context, this paper delves into information structure of relative clauses in English with an eye toward creation of a computational model from a standpoint of machine translation. The current work employs Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG, Pollard and Sag (1994)) as a theory of grammar and Minimal Recursion Semantics (MRS, Copestake et al. (2005) as a meaning representation system. Building upon these formalisms, this paper addresses how information structure of relative clauses can be represented and constrained. The current work makes use of Individual CONStraints (ICONS) for modeling relative clauses with respect to information structure. The current work also investigates which relative clause involves which information structure constraint. The present study argues that non-restrictive relative clauses impose a more specific constraint on information structure than restrictive relative clauses.