LFG for Chinese: Issues of Representation and Computation
Abstract
Proceedings of LFG01; CSLI Publications On-line
LFG has been widely used to analyze English language as well as other languages from linguistic point of view [Joan Bresnan 2001; Louisa Sadler 1996], including Chinese [Lian-Cheng Chief 1996; One-Soon Her. 1997]. A new direction in LFG research field is applying it to language computation, ranging from parsing to machine translation [Louisa Sadler, Josef van Genabith, and Andy Way 2000; Mark Johnson 2000; Miriam Butt, Stefanie Dipper, Anette Frank, and Tracy Holloway King 1999]. However, the LFG-based work in Chinese computing is rather rare [Lian-Cheng Chief, Chu-Ren Huang, Keh-Jiann Chen et al 1998].
The current framework of LFG shows two folds when being employed in Chinese computing tasks: it is quite powerful for linguistic representation, but seems not to be strong enough for Chinese computation – there exists some room for improving the formalism of LFG. This paper will center on these two issues.