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SFB 732:  Incremental Specification in Context

Subject Area Humanities
Computer Science, Systems and Electrical Engineering
Term from 2006 to 2018
Project identifier Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 22956010
 
Final Report Year 2018

Final Report Abstract

In collaborations between the various subfields of Linguistics and Computational Linguistics, the Collaborative Research Center (CRC) 732 has over a total of 12 years studied a property of linguistic expressions – and the elements that they are composed of – which is observable across all levels of linguistic description: most elements are ambiguous or underspecified when viewed in isolation, but when elements are combined to form larger complexes, most of the ambiguities get resolved. Speech sounds that are compatible with a) various phonemes (e.g. unstressed vowel sounds in fast speech) and/or b) different prosodic categories receive a specific interpretation in a given utterance; syncretic morphological forms (like German sie =she/her/they/them) are disambiguated given the syntax of the sentence; the reading of deverbal nouns like construction, which can refer to an event or its result, is narrowed down through modifiers such as ongoing; etc. At each of the relevant levels of description, it is the elements’ context that drives the disambiguation decision, and the more information becomes available, the narrower is the choice of targets. So what we observe is incremental specification in context. Any account of an aspect of language(s) and language processing must include mechanisms for describing this key ingredient to efficient communicative exchanges, but fully understanding how all relevant levels interact has remained a major challenge in the study of language: Is it specification/disambiguation at one level that triggers further specification decisions at another or vice versa? Or should one assume simultaneous specification decisions? By pursuing these questions in depth for a broad range of linguistic elements, the CRC 732 has significantly enhanced our systematic understanding of language and of speech and language processing. Research contributions range from theoretical advances in various different frameworks over improvements of language-technological models and methodologies to data resources such as speech and text corpora and computational analysis tools.

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