Deep Processing of Honorification Phenomena in a Typed Feature Structure Grammar

Honorific agreement is one of the main properties of languages like Korean or Japanese, playing an important role in appropriate communication. This makes the deep processing of honorific information crucial in various computational applications such as spoken language translation and generation. We argue that, contrary to the previous literature, an adequate analysis of Korean honorification involves a system that has access not only to morphosyntax but to semantics and pragmatics as well. Along these lines, we have developed a typed feature structure grammar of Korean (based on the framework of HPSG), and implemented it in the Linguistic Knowledge Builder System (LKB). The results of parsing our experimental test suites show that our grammar provides us with enriched grammatical information that can lead to the development of a robust dialogue system for the language.