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CSLI Calendar, 24 December 1997, vol. 13:14


     C S L I   C A L E N D A R   O F   P U B L I C   E V E N T S
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24 December 1997                Stanford               Vol. 13, No. 14
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                     A weekly publication of the
       Center for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI)
      Stanford University, Ventura Hall, Stanford, CA 94305-4115
                             ____________

            ACTIVITIES DURING 5 JANUARY TO  9 JANUARY 1998

MONDAY, 5 JANUARY
         2:15pm CSLI Talk
                Cordura 100
                An Integrated Approach to Performance Modelling
                Hans Uszkoreit
                Universitaet des Saarlandes and DFKI Saarbruecken
                             ____________

                             ANNOUNCEMENT

I know we said we weren't going to have a Calendar until 7 January but
something turned up that needed to be announced.  CSLI itself will be
closed from 25 December to 5 January.
                             ____________

                              CSLI TALK
                  on Monday, 5 January 1997, 2:15pm
                        Cordura Hall, Room 100
            [http://www-csli.stanford.edu/csli/Coglunch/]

           An Integrated Approach to Performance Modelling
                            Hans Uszkoreit
          Universitaet des Saarlandes and DFKI Saarbruecken

More adequate models of human linguistic performance are expected to
provide better explanations for observed inventories of grammars. In
my talk I will describe an approach to performance modelling that
combines theoretical linguistic research, experimental computational
work, and several types of empirical investigation. The approach will
be demonstrated by discussing a concrete example, the phenomenon of
right-extraposition.

For current processing models in computational linguistics,
right-extraposition adds an additional burden to parsing. This
contrasts the intuition that the right-shift of heavy constituents
serves the purpose of facilitating processing. Hawkins (1995) proposes
an interesting metric for parsing complexity that makes concrete
predictions on the conditions under which extraposition is to be
expected. Although he backs up his claims by providing some data from
literary texts, his data are too limited to be conclusive.
 
New empirical results on relative clause extraposition shed more light
on the conditions that trigger this construction. The results were
obtained by a study on the distribution of extraposed and
non-extraposed relative clauses in a corpus of German newspaper
texts. The sentences of the corpus have semi-automatically been
annotated by tektogrammarical structures. The frequency data are
accompanied by acceptability rating tests measuring relative
subjective judgements. In some essential aspects our findings confirm
Hawkins's assumptions.

I will conclude by outlining a processing model that accounts for the
observed facts. The model is still under construction and will remain
that way for quite some time.

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                             END MATERIAL

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                             ____________