[developers] Wish for scoped MRSs in the LKB

[Francisco Costa]

Hi,

I would like to send in a wish for the LKB.

As far as I can tell from experimenting with it, asking for scoped MRSs 
does not perform unification operations on the handles that end up being 
merged.

I'm trying to do the following. When you have a sentence like `all men 
love a certain woman', the existential quantifier must outscope the 
universal one. So I tried this: (1) add a feature SCOPE to handles, of a 
type *scope* which has two subtypes *widest* and *non-widest*, (2) 
constrain the LBL of the `a certain' quantifier to have SCOPE *widest* 
and (3) constrain the BODY of the `all' quantifier to have a SCOPE 
*non-widest*.
They do not unify (and manual unification in the AVMs fails), so I was 
hoping that the reading *all_q(x1, ..., a+certain_q(x2, ..., ...))* 
would not come up when you ask for scoped MRSs, but it does. Using 
subtypes of *handle* instead (no feature SCOPE) doesn't do it either.

Is it possible/feasible to have an algorithm for scoped MRSs that 
performs unifications on handles? I think I've read somewhere that it's 
already exponential on the number of NPs, but I guess feature structures 
of type *handle* will never be very big.

Thank you in advance,

Francisco Costa