7 - Situation schemata and linguistic representation

Summary

INTRODUCTION

This chapter concerns experiments with Situation Schemata as a linguistic representation language, in the first instance for Machine Translation purposes but not exclusively so. The work reported is primarily concerned with the adaptation of the Situation Schemata language presented by Fenstad et al. [56] (but see also Fenstad et al. in this volume) to an implementation within grammars having interestingly broad linguistic coverage. We shall also consider the computational tools required for such an implementation and our underlying motivation. The chapter is therefore not solely concerned with the form of the representation language and its relation to any eventual interpretation language, but also with practical and methodological issues associated with the implementation of current theories in Computational Linguistics. A key theme is the interplay between linguistic information, representation and appropriate mechanisms for abstraction.

The rest of the chapter is divided into three further sections. Section 7.2 suggests that the problem of translation can shed light on a range of representational issues on the syntax/semantics border; it contains a brief introduction to Situation Semantics and the original version of Situation Schemata. Section 7.3 outlines the design of a computational toolkit for experimenting with unification-based descriptions, concentrating on details of the grammar formalism and its abstraction mechanisms. Section 7.4 considers the form of Situation Schemata that has been implemented within a grammar of German and some related representational issues that arise out of this work.