Efficient Construction of Underspecified Semantics under Massive Ambiguity

TL;DR

This paper introduces an efficient algorithm for constructing compact underspecified semantic representations from ambiguous syntactic parse forests, significantly reducing computational complexity in handling highly ambiguous sentences.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel method that directly builds packed semantic structures from parse forests, improving efficiency over naive approaches for ambiguous sentences.

Findings

Algorithm runs in $O(n^4 log(n))$ time under certain conditions

Method effectively handles high ambiguity with compact semantic representations

Implementation demonstrates practical applicability

Abstract

We investigate the problem of determining a compact underspecified semantical representation for sentences that may be highly ambiguous. Due to combinatorial explosion, the naive method of building semantics for the different syntactic readings independently is prohibitive. We present a method that takes as input a syntactic parse forest with associated constraint-based semantic construction rules and directly builds a packed semantic structure. The algorithm is fully implemented and runs in $O(n^4 log(n))$ in sentence length, if the grammar meets some reasonable `normality' restrictions.