Linguistics 575: Information Structure in Computational Syntax

Winter quarter, 2010

Course Info

• Lecture: Thursdays, 3:30-5:50 in MGH 074
• Our GoPost bulletin board
• E-reserves

Instructor Info

• Emily M. Bender
• Office Hours: 1/8 1:30-3:00, Fridays 1:30-3:20 thereafter (except 2/12) & by appointment
• Office: Padelford A-219
• Phone: 543-6914
• Email: ebender at u

Syllabus

Description

Information structure is an important part of the meaning of natural language sentences, indicating which information is given/topical and which information is new/in focus. As Partee (1991) notes, certain aspects of information structure can interact with truth conditional semantics. In addition, different languages use different morphological, syntactic, and phonological means of marking information structure in sentences. Thus information structure is an important point of contact in the interfaces between levels of linguistic structure, and critical in applications such as (transfer-based) machine translation.

In this seminar, we will survey the literature on information structure, including computational and non-computational approaches. The central research questions will be: How can we design a system of representations for information structure that captures the relevant distinctions and can be calculated compositionally in the course of syntactic processing? How do languages vary in the means they use to express information structural concepts, and what are the bounds on that variation?

Note: To request academic accommodations due to a disability, please contact Disabled Student Services, 448 Schmitz, 206-543-8924 (V/TTY). If you have a letter from Disabled Student Services indicating that you have a disability which requires academic accommodations, please present the letter to the instructor so we can discuss the accommodations you might need in this class.

Requirements

• Leading discussions of papers (15)
• KWLH paper (approx 7 pages) (20).
• Participation in discussions (15).
• Term project (or paper) (50).

Schedule of Topics and Assignments (may be updated)

Bibliography

Papers that are available online will be linked to directly. Others will be uploaded to our e-reserves page.

• Bos, J. (1999). The treatment of focusing particles in underspecified discourse representations. Focus-Linguistic, Cognitive and Computational Perspectives , 121–141.
• Büring, D. (1999). Topic. In P. Bosch & R. van der Sandt (Eds.), Focus: Linguistic, cognitive, and computational perspectives (pp. 142–165). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Casielles-Suarez, E. (2004) The Syntax-Information Structure Interface. New York & London: Routledge.
• Copestake, A., Flickinger, D., Pollard, C., & Sag, I. A. (2005). Minimal recursion semantics: An introduction. Research on Language & Computation, 3 (4), 281–332.
• Debusmann, R., Postolache, O., & Traat, M. (2005). A modular account of information structure in Extensible Dependency Grammar. In Proceedings of the Cicling 2005 conference.
• Engdahl, E., & Vallduvi, E. (1996). Information packaging in HPSG. Edinburgh Working Papers in Cognitive Science, 12 , 1–32.
• Erteschik-Shir, N. (2007). Information structure: The syntax-discourse interface. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Gundel, J. K. (1988). Universals of Topic-Comment Structure. Studies in Syntactic Typology , 209–239.
• Gundel, J. K. (1999). On Different Kinds of Focus. In P. Bosch & R. van der Sandt (Eds.), Focus: Linguistic, cognitive, and computational perspectives (pp. 293–305). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Gussenhoven, C. (2007). Types of focus in English. In C. Lee, M. Gordon, & D. Büring (Eds.), Topic and focus: Cross-linguistic perspectives on meaning and intonation (p. 83-100). Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
• Hempelmann, C., Dufty, D., McCarthy, P., Graesser, A., Cai, Z., & McNamara, D. (2005). Using LSA to Automatically Identify Givenness and Newness of Noun Phrases in Written Discourse. Proceedings of the XXVII Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. Stresa, Italy. 941-949.
• Jokinen, K., & Wilcock, G. (2003). Adaptivity and response generation in a spoken dialogue system. Current and new directions in discourse and dialogue, 213.
• Kruijff, G.-J. M. (2002). Formulating a Category of Informativity. In H. Hasselgrd, S. Johansson, B. Behrens, & C. Fabricius-Hansen (Eds.), Information structure in a cross–linguistic perspective (pp. 129–146). Amsterdam: Rodopi.
• Lambrecht, K. (1996). Information Structure and Sentence Form: Topic, Focus, and the Mental Representations of Discourse Referents. Cambridge, NY: Cambridge Univ Press.
• Mereu, L. (2009). Universals of Information Structure. In L. Mereu (Ed.), Information structure and its interfaces (pp. 75–104). Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
• Molnr, V. (2002). Contrast – from a Contrastive Perspective. In H. Hasselgrd, S. Johansson, B. Behrens, & C. Fabricius-Hansen (Eds.), Information structure in a cross–linguistic perspective (pp. 147–162). Amsterdam: Rodopi.
• Navarretta, C. (2002). Combining Information Structure and Centering-based Models of Salience for Resolving Intersentential Pronominal Anaphora. In Proceedings of the 4th daarc (pp. 135–140).
• Paggio, P. (1997). The treatment of information structure in machine translation. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Copenhagen.
• Paggio, P. (2005). Representing information structure in a formal grammar of Danish. In Proceedings of the 2nd international workshop on logic and engineering of natural language semantics (lenls2005).
• Paggio, P. (2009). The information structure of Danish grammar constructions. Nordic Journal of Linguistics, 32 (01), 137–164.
• Partee, B. H. (1991). Topic, focus and quantification. Cornell Working Papers in Linguistics , 10 , 159–187.
• Rebuschi, G., & Tuller, L. (1999). The Grammar of Focus: An Introduction. In G. Rebuschi & L. Tuller (Eds.), The grammar of focus (pp. 1–22). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Co.
• Steedman, M. (2000). Information Structure and the Syntax–Phonology Interface. Linguistic Inquiry , 31 (4), 649–689.
• Steedman, M. (2007). Information–Structural Semantics for English Intonation. In C. Lee, M. Gordon, & D. Bring (Eds.), Topic and focus: Cross–linguistic perspectives on meaning and intonation (pp. 245–264). Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
• Wilcock, G. (2005). Information Structure and Minimal Recursion Semantics. In A. Arppe et al. (Eds.), Inquiries into words, constraints and contexts (pp. 268–277). Stanford: CSLI Publications.