Readers 读者
LFG for Chinese: Issues of Representation and Computation
LFG用于汉语：表示与计算中的若干问题
Maosong Sun 孙茂松
Abstract 摘要
LFG has been widely used to analyze the English language as well as other languages from a purely linguistic point of view. A relatively new direction in the LFG research field is applying it to language computation, ranging from parsing to machine translation. The LFG-based work in Chinese computing is still rather rare. This paper addresses two aspects of the current framework of LFG in terms of its application to the processing of Chinese: it is quite powerful for linguistic representation, even very sophisticated sentential constructions in Chinese can be explained by LFG easily, but it seems not strong enough for Chinese computation –the main weakness is on the computation of semantics. However, it is evident that it is semantic analysis, rather than syntactic analysis, which plays a dominant role in analyzing Chinese sentences. Consequently, the paper suggests some possible augmentation on the framework of LFG: (1) representing semantic constraints in a systematic way; (2) building up the semantic knowledge base to make inference on the augmented framework possible; (3) incorporating statistics into the LFG formalism; and (4) augmenting the operation of unification to fit the statistical computation.