Syntactic indeterminacy and semantic ambiguity

A case study for German spatial phrases

Michael Spranger | Sony Computer Science Laboratory Paris

Martin Loetzsch | Sony Computer Science Laboratory Paris

This chapter presents an operational grammar for German spatial language, in particular German locative phrases, as a case study for processing distributed information. It investigates the complex interplay of syntactic phenomena and spatial semantics, with a specific emphasis on efficient processing of syntactic indeterminacy and semantic ambiguity. Since FCG applies constructions in a sequence one after the other, the main challenge lies in mutual dependencies between constructions, that is, some constructions require pieces of information in order to make decisions that are only later on provided by other constructions. We present solutions and design patterns for dealing with these processing issues, which all have in common the strategy of postponing decisions as long as possible in processing until all the necessary information for making the decision is available.

Published online: 07 December 2011
https://doi.org/10.1075/cal.11.14spr

Cited by

Cited by 5 other publications

Pauw, Simon & Michael Spranger

2012. In New Directions in Logic, Language and Computation [Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 7415], ► pp. 52 ff.

Spranger, Michael

2013. In 2013 IEEE Third Joint International Conference on Development and Learning and Epigenetic Robotics (ICDL), ► pp. 1 ff.

Spranger, Michael

2013. Evolving Grounded Spatial Language Strategies. KI - Künstliche Intelligenz 27:2 ► pp. 97 ff.

Spranger, Michael

2015. In 2015 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), ► pp. 4204 ff.

Steels, Luc, Joachim De Beule & Pieter Wellens

2012. In Language Grounding in Robots, ► pp. 195 ff.

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