Generation and Synchronous Tree-Adjoining Grammars

The recent history of grammar reversing can be viewed as an effort to recover seine notion of semantic locality on which to base a generation process. For instance, Wedekind (1988) requires a property of a grammar that he refers to as connectedness, which specifies that complements be semantically connected to their head. Shieber (1981) defines a notion of semantic monotonicity, a kind of compositionality property that guarantees that it can be locally determined whether phrases can contribute to forming an expression with a given meaning. Generation schemes that reorder top-down generation (Dymetman and Isabelle, 1988; Strzalkowski, 1989) so as to make available information that well-founds the top-down recursion also fall into the mold of localizing semantic information. Semantic-head-driven generation (Shieber et al., forthcoming; Calder et al., 1989) uses semantic heads and their complements as a locus of semantic locality.