Midterm questions and definitions

Define the following terms:

1) Discourse: is the language phenomena that operate at the word or
sentence level. Of course, language doesnt normally consist of isolated,
unrelated sentences but instead of collocated, related groups of sentences.
2) Dialogue: consists of much free interaction in dialogue, each participant
takes turns being a speaker and hearer. Dialogue consists of many
different types of communications acts; asking questions, answers etc
3) HCI: Has properties to distinguish human-computer dialogue from
normal human-human dialogue, in part due to the present day limitation
on the ability of computer systems to participate in free, unconstrained
conversation. A system capable of HCI will often employ a strategy to
constrain the conversation in ways that allow it to understand the users
utterances within a limited context of interpretation.
4) Reference: the process by which speakers use expression like (John/he) to
denote a person named John.
5) Referring expression: a natural language expression used to perform
reference.
6) Referent: the entity that is referred to.
7) Information retrieval: finding out where needed textual resources reside
8) Information extraction: extracting pertinent facts from those textual
resources
9) Inference: drawing conclusions based on known facts.
10) Regular expression (RE): a language for specifying text search
strings. The regular expression language used for searching texts in
Microsoft Wordsetc
11) Syntax: comes from the Greek syntaxis, meaning setting out together
or arrangements and refers to the way words are arranged together.
12) Constituency: group of words that may behave as single unit or
phrase
13) Grammatical relations: a formalization of ideas from traditional
grammar about subjects
14) Subcategorizations: refers to certain kinds of relations between words
and phrases
15) Dependency relations: refers to certain kinds of relations between
words and phrases
16) Context-free grammar: consists of a set of rules or productions, each
of which expresses the ways that symbols of the language can be grouped
and ordered together
17) Terminal: the symbols that are used in a CFG and are divided into two
classes. The symbols that correspond to words in the language
18) The lexicon: is the set of rules that introduce these terminal symbols
19) Nonterminals: the symbols that express clusters or organizations of
these
20) WC: is an ordinary data processing application
Answer the following questions:
1) What are the categories of knowledge of language?
Phonetics and phonology: The study of linguistic sounds.

Morphology: The study of the meaningful components of words.

Syntax: The study of the structural relationships between words.

Semantics: The study of meaning.

Pragmatics: the study of how language is used to accomplish goals.

Discourse: The study of linguistics units larger than a single utterance.

2) What is meant by the verb phrase and subcategorization??

The verb phrase consists of the verb and a number of other constituents.
These other constituents include NPs and PPs and combinations of the two:

VP verb disappear
VP verb NP prefer a morning fight
VP verb NP PP leave Boston in the morning
VP verb PP leaving on Thursday
Verb phrases can be significantly more complicated than this. Many other
kinds of constituents can follow the verb, such as an entire embedded
sentence. These are called sentential complements:
you {VP{v said{s there were two flights that were the cheapest}}}
you {VP {v said { s you had a two hundred sixty six dollar fare}}
{VP {v tell} {NP me } {S hot to get me from the airport in
Philadelphia to downtown}}
I {VP {v think {s I would like to take the nine thirty flight}}
Heres a rule for these
VP VERB S.

Where traditional grammars subcategorized verbs into these two

categories (transitive and intransitive), modern grammars distinguish as
many as 100 subcategories. In fact tag sets for many such
subcategorization frames exist. We say that a verb like find
subcategorizes for an NP. We also call these constituents the complements
of the verb. So we say that a verb like want can take a VP complement.
These possible sets of complements are called the subcatigorization frame
for the verb.
3. What is meant by postmodifiers, modifiers and gerundive
modifiers?
After a noun:A head noun can be followed by postmodifiers. Threekinds
of nominal postmodifiers are very common in English:
Prepositional phrase all flights from Cleveland
Non-finite clauses any flights arriving after eleven a.m.
Relative clause a flight that serves breakfast.
Prepositional phrase modifiers are particulary common in ATIS corpus,
since they are used to mark the origin and destination of flights. Here are
some examples, with brackets inserted to show the boundaries of each
PP; note that more than one PP can be strung together.
any stopovers { for Delta seven fifty one }
all flights { from Cleveland } { to Newark }
arrival { in San Jose } { before seven p.m.}
a reservation {on flight six oh six} {from Tampa} {to Montreal}
Here's a new NP rule to be account for one to three PP postmodifiers
Nominal Nominal PP ( PP ) ( PP )
The three most common kinds of non-finite postmodifiers are the
gerundive (-ing ), -ed, and infinitive forms.
Gerundive postmodifiers are so called because they consist of a verb
phrase that begins with the gerund (-ing) form of the verb in the
following examples. The verb phrases happen to all have only
prepositional phrases after the verb, but in general this verb phrase can
have anything in it (anything, which is semantically and syntactically
compatible with the gerund verb ).
Any of those ( leaving on Thursday )
Any flights ( arriving after eleven a.m. )
Flights ( arriving within thirty minutes of each other )
We can define the NP as follows, making use of a new nonterminal
Gerund VP:
Nominal Nominal Gerund VP
We can make rules for Gerund VP constituents by duplicating all of our
VP productions, substituting Gerund V for V.
Gerund VP -------- Gerund V NP
Gerund V PP
Gerund V
Gerund V NP PP
Gerund V can be defined as:
 Gerund V . being , preferring , arriving, leaving
The phrases in italics below are examples of the two other common kinds
of non-finite clauses, infinitives and ed forms:
The last flight to arrive in Boston
I need to have dinner served
Which is the aircraft used by this flight?