Clippers Tuesday: Michael White on Evaluation Order Effects in Dynamic Continuized CCG

Evaluation Order Effects in Dynamic Continuized CCG:
From Negative Polarity Items to Balanced Punctuation

Combinatory Categorial Grammar’s (CCG; Steedman, 2000) flexible treatment of word order and constituency enable it to employ a compact lexicon, an important factor in its successful application to a range of NLP problems. However, its word order flexibility can be problematic for linguistic phenomena where linear order plays a key role. In this talk, I’ll show that the enhanced control over evaluation order afforded by Continuized CCG (Barker & Shan, 2014) makes it possible to formulate improved analyses of negative polarity items and balanced punctuation, and discuss their implementation as a refinement to a prototype parser for Dynamic Continuized CCG (White et al., 2017).