This talk provides an overview of current work in my research group on the syntactic annotation of the Tiibingen corpus of spoken German and of the German Reference Corpus (Deutsches Referenzkorpus: DEREKO) of written texts. Morpho-syntactic and syntactic annotation as well as annotation of function-argument structure for these corpora is performed automatically by a hybrid architecture that combines robust symbolic parsing with finite-state methods ("chunk parsing" in the sense Abney) with memory-based parsing (in the sense of Daelemans). The resulting robust annotations can be used by theoretical linguists, who are interested in large-scale, empirical data, and by computational linguists, who are in need of training material for a wide range of language technology applications. To aid retrieval of annotated trees from the treebank, a query tool VIQTORYA with a graphical user interface and a logic-based query language has been developed. VIQTORYA allows users to query the treebanks for linguistic structures at the word level, at the level of individual phrases, and at the clausal level.

As part of a long-ranged project that aims at establishing database-theoretic semantics as a model of computational semantics, this presentation focuses on the development of a syntactic component for processeing strings of words or sentences to construct semantic data structures. For design and modeling purposes, the present treatment will be restricted to the analysis of some problematic constructions of Korean involving semi-free word order, conjunction and temporal anchoring, and adnominal modification and antecedent binding. The present work heavily relies on Hausser``s (1999, 2000) SLIM theory for language that is based on surface compositionality, time-linearity and two other conditions on natural language processing. Time-linear syntax for natural language has been shown to be concep-tually simple and computationally efficient. The associated semantics is complex, however, because it must deal with situated language involving interactive multi-agents. Nevertheless, by processing input word strings in a time-linear mode, the syntax can incrementally construct the necessary semantic structures for relevant queries and valid inferences. The fragment of Korean syntax will be implemented in Malaga, a C-type implementation language that was enriched for both programming and debugging purposes and that was particluarly made suitable for implementing in Left-Associative Grammar. This presentation will show how the system of syntactic rules with constraining subrules processes Korean sentences in a step-by-step time-linear manner to incrementally construct semantic data structures that mainly specify relations with their argument, temporal, and binding structures.

One main complexity of the copula constructions concerns a mismatch between morphology and syntactic constituency: the copula seems to form a morphological unit with the immediately preceding element, whereas in terms of syntax the copula appears to take this as its syntactic complement. In capturing such mismatches, we show that the copula is treated as an independent verb at the level of tectogrammatical structure (or syntax tree), whereas as a bound morpheme at the level of phenogram-matical structure (or domain tree), in terms of Dowty 1992 (or Reape 1994). This paper, adopting the notion of DOMAIN in HPSG, shows that copula constructions are a subtype of compacting-constructions. These constructions compact the domain value of the copula and that of its preceding element together into one domain unit, eventually making it inert to syntactic phenomena such as scrambling, deletion and pro-form substitution. This construction-based approach provides a clean analysis for the formation of the copula construction and related phenomena.

The information extraction is to delimit in advance, as part of the specification of the task, the semantic range of the output and to filter information from large volumes of texts. The most representative word of the document is composed of named entities and pronouns. Therefore, it is important to resolve coreference in order to extract the meaningful information in information extraction. Coreference resolution is to find name entities co-referencing real-world entities in the documents. Results of coreference resolution are used for name entity detection and template generation. This paper presents the heuristic-based approach for coreference resolution in Korean. We constructed the heuristics expanded gradually by using the corpus and derived the salience factors of antecedents as the importance measure in Korean. Our approach consists of antecedents selection and antecedents weighting. We used three kinds of salience factors that are used to weight each antecedent of the anaphor. The experiment result shows 80% precision.

In this paper, we address two questions concerning negative imperatives in Korean: (i) what is the morpho-syntactic nature of ma1 in negative imperatives?; and (ii) why is it impossible to form negative imperatives with short negation an? We will argue that the clause structure of imperatives include a projection of deontic modality and a projection of imperative operator encoding illocutionary force, and that ma1 is a lexicalization of long negation and deontic modality. We then propose that a negative imperative with short negation is ruled out because such construction maps onto incoherent interpretation which can be spelled out as I direct you to bring about a negative state or a negative event.

This paper discusses issues in building a 54-thousand-word Korean Treebank using a phrase structure annotation, along with developing annotation guidelines based on the morpho-syntactic phenomena represented in the corpus. Various methods that were employed for quality control and the evaluation on the Treebank are also presented.

Structural analysis of compound words is necessary and an important process in natural language processing. Proposed here is a corpus- and statistics- based method for the structural analysis of compound words in Japanese. We determine the structure of a ``compound word by using Internet corpus and calculating the strength of word association among its constituent words. Experiments with 5, 6, 7, and 8 kanji compound words show that our method works well and its performance is better than those of other comparable studies.

The issue of adjuncts has long been a neglected field of linguistic study whether it be syntactic or semantic. It is only in Pustejovsky (1995) that we find a brief mention of adjuncts. In addition to what the author calls true arguments, default arguments, and shadow arguments, he sets up a class of true adjuncts citing the following sentence, Mary drove down to New York on Tuesday. We will take up a small lexical item sugiru in Japanese, and we will argue that we should posit the notion of implicit adjuncts in describing the properties with the small Japanese lexical item sugiru. Throughout the discussions that follow we will demonstrate how the notion is independently motivated irrespective of what linguistic theory we are going to adopt.

This paper aims to give an explanation of the combination of certain nouns and the verb ha- ``do``. Although the verb ha- ``do`` normally takes an event type argument, it takes some substantival nouns such as paiolin ``violin``, umsikcem ``restaurant``, and so on. A substantival noun undergoes type shifting because the governing verb ha- ``do`` coerces an entity type noun to an event reading, taking missing information from the qualia of the entity type noun. In addition, some nouns like ppallay ``laundry`` are dot objects. The verb taking a dot object selects a proper type between multiple subtypes of the dot object. Type pumping operation makes that selection possible.