Selectional Restrictions in HPSG

TL;DR

This paper explores two methods for integrating selectional restrictions into HPSG, enhancing natural language processing tasks like disambiguation and anaphora resolution.

Contribution

It introduces two practical methods for incorporating selectional restrictions into HPSG, one using Background features and the other using referential subsorts.

Findings

The second method effectively blocks invalid readings during parsing.

Both methods improve the practical application of HPSG in NLP tasks.

The second method is particularly useful despite being theoretically less elegant.

Abstract

Selectional restrictions are semantic sortal constraints imposed on the participants of linguistic constructions to capture contextually-dependent constraints on interpretation. Despite their limitations, selectional restrictions have proven very useful in natural language applications, where they have been used frequently in word sense disambiguation, syntactic disambiguation, and anaphora resolution. Given their practical value, we explore two methods to incorporate selectional restrictions in the HPSG theory, assuming that the reader is familiar with HPSG. The first method employs HPSG's Background feature and a constraint-satisfaction component pipe-lined after the parser. The second method uses subsorts of referential indices, and blocks readings that violate selectional restrictions during parsing. While theoretically less satisfactory, we have found the second method particularly useful in the development of practical systems.