Counting Coordination Categorially

Abstract

This paper presents a way of reducing the complexity of parsing free coordination. It lives on the Coordinative Count Invariant, a property of derivable sequences in occurrence-sensitive categorial grammar. This invariant can be exploited to cut down deterministically the search space for coordinated sentences to minimal fractions. The invariant is based on inequalities, which is shown to be the best one can get in the presence of coordination without proper parsing. It is implemented in a categorial parser for Dutch. Some results of applying the invariant to the parsing of coordination in this parser are presented.