This reader contains material for the ESSLLI '99 course, ``Scope Underspecification and Processing''. The reader and course are
aimed at a pretty broad audience; we have tried to only presuppose
a very general idea of natural language processing and of
first-order logic.
Underspecification is a general approach to dealing with
ambiguity. In the course, we'll be particularly concerned with
scope underspecification, which deals with scope ambiguity, a
structural ambiguity of the semantics of a sentence. As scope
underspecification is at least partially motivated by computational
issues, we will pay particular attention to processing aspects.
We're going to show how dominance constraints can be used for
scope underspecification and how they can be processed
efficiently by using concurrent constraint programming
technology.