On the Use of Semantic Constraints in Guiding Syntactic Analysis

It is argued that in natural language comprehension, the degree of sensibleness of the possible interpretations of sentences and parts of sentences is used to guide syntactic analysis by assisting in making the decisions about which interpretations should continue to be processed. Continuous sensibleness information is shown to be necessary for the successful resolution of many syntactically ambiguous sentences, that is, to obtain the meaning that is most likely to have been intended by the speaker. The computation of the degree of sensibleness of each interpretation is hypothesized to take place in parallel with the analysis of its syntactic structure and to be performed through the use of semantic constraints that may be more or less satisfled. A formulation of continuous semantic constraints is proposed and characteristics of such constraints are examined including how such semantic constraints may be derived directly from knowledge in a fuzzy propositional semantic memory.

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