Jaehyung Yang

Projections from Morphology to Syntax in the Korean Resource Grammar: Implementing Typed Feature Structures

Korean has a complex inflectional system, showing agglutinative morphology and using affixation as the major mechanism for word formation. A prerequisite to the successful development of any syntactic/semantic parsers for the language thus hinges on the efficient lexicon that can syntactically expand its lexical entries and map into syntax and semantics with robust parsing performance. This paper reports the system of the Korean Resource Grammar developed as an extension of HPSG (Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar) and the results of implementing it into the Linguistic Knowledge Building (LKB) system (cf. Copestake 2002). The paper shows that the present grammar proves to be theoretically as well as computationally efficient enough in parsing Korean sentences.

Coordination structures in a typed feature structure grammar: formalization and implementation

Every language employs its own coordination strategies, according to the type of coordinating marking, the pattern of marking, the position of the marker, and the phrase types coordinated. The SOV language Korean is intriguing in the sense that it displays almost all the possibilities of these dimensions. This paper shows how a typed feature structure grammar, HPSG, together with the notions of ‘type hierarchy’ and ‘constructions’, can provide a robust basis for parsing the coordination constructions found in the language. We show that this system induces robust syntactic structures as well as enriched semantic representations for real-time applications such as machine translation, which require deep processing of the phenomena concerned.

Parsing korean honorification phenomena in a typed feature structure grammar

Honorific agreement is one of the main properties of languages like Korean or Japanese, playing an important role in appropriate communication. This makes the deep processing of honorific information crucial in various computational applications such as spoken language translation and generation. We argue that, contrary to the previous literature, an adequate analysis of Korean honorification involves a system that has access not only to morpho-syntax but to semantics and pragmatics as well. Along these lines, we have developed a typed feature structure grammar of Korean (based on the framework of HPSG), and implemented it in the Linguistic Knowledge Builder (LKB). The results of parsing our experimental test suites show that our grammar provides us with enriched grammatical information that can lead to the development of a robust dialogue system for the language.

Deep processing of korean floating quantifier constructions

The so-called floating quantifier constructions in languages like Korean display intriguing properties whose successful processing can prove the robustness of a parsing system. This paper shows that a constraint-based analysis, in particular couched upon the framework of HPSG, can offer us an efficient way of parsing these constructions together with proper semantic representations. It also shows how the analysis has been successfully implemented in the LKB (Linguistic Knowledge Building) system.

Parsing korean case phenomena in a type-feature structure grammar

For a free-word order language such as Korean, case marking remains a central topic in generative grammar analyses for several reasons. Case plays a central role in argument licensing, in the signalling of grammatical functions, and has the potential to mark properties of information structure. In addition, case marking presents a theoretical and computational test area for understanding the properties of the syntax-morphology interface of the language. This is why it is no exaggeration to say that parsing Korean starts from work on the case system of the language. This paper reports the case system of the Korean Phrase Structure Grammar (KPSG) developed as a Korean resource grammar for computational purposes and implemented in the Linguistic Knowledge Building (LKB) system. The grammar adopts the constraint-based mechanisms of feature unification and multiple inheritance type hierarchies as an extension of HPSG (Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar) and is proved to be empirically and computationally sound and efficient.

A computational implementation of internally headed relative clause constructions

The so-called Internally Headed Relative Clause (IHRC) construction found in the head-final languages Korean and Japanese has received little attention from computational perspectives even though it is frequently found in both text and speech. This is partly because there have been no grammars precise enough to allow deep processing of the construction’s syntactic and semantic properties. This paper shows that the typed feature structure grammar HPSG (together with the semantic representations of Minimal Recursion Semantics) offers a computationally feasible and useful way of deep-parsing the construction in question.

Parsing mixed constructions in a type feature structure grammar

Because of the mixed properties of nominal and verbal properties, Korean gerundive phrases (GPs) posit intriguing issues to both theoretical as well as computational analyses. Various theoretical approaches have been proposed to solve this puzzle, but they all have ended up abandoning or modifying fundamental theory-neutral desiderata such as endocentricity (every phrase has a head), lexicalism (no syntactic rule refers to the word-internal structure), and null licensing (abstract entities are avoided if possible) (cf. Pullum 1991, Malouf 1998). This paper shows that it is possible to analyze and efficiently parse the mixed properties of Korean GPs in a way that maintains the desiderata while avoiding abstract entities. This has been achieved through Korean Phrase Structure Grammar, an extension of HPSG that models human languages as systems of constraints on typed feature structures. The feasibility of the grammar is tested by implementing it into the LKB (Linguistics Knowledge Building) system (cf. Copestake 2002).

Feature unification and constraint satisfaction in parsing korean case phenomena

For a free-word order language such as Korean, case marking remains a central topic in generative grammar analyses for several reasons Case plays a central role in argument licensing, in the signalling of grammatical functions, and has the potential to mark properties of information structure In addition, case marking presents a theoretical test area for understanding the properties of the syntax-morphology interface This is why it is no exaggeration to say that parsing Korean sentences starts from work on the case system of the language This paper reports the project that develops a Korean Resource Grammar (KRG, Kim and Yang 2004), built upon the constrain-based mechanisms of feature unification and multiple inheritance type hierarchies as an extension of HPSG (Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar), and shows that the results of its implementation in the Linguistic Knowledge Building System (cf Copestake 2002) prove its empirical and theoretical efficiency in parsing case-related phenomena.