--- title: "Unificational Combinatory Categorial Grammar. Combining" description: "Traat and Bos propose Unificational Combinatory Categorial Grammar (UCCG). 10 references, cited by 1 paper here." authors: ["Maarika Traat", "Johan Bos"] year: 2004 venue: "COLING 2004: Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Computational Linguistics" source: "https://aclanthology.org/C04-1043/" licence: "CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 (ACL Anthology, before 2016)" licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/" summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License" canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/traat-2004-unificational-combinatory-categorial-grammar-combining/" --- [Elamur Research](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/traat-2004-unificational-combinatory-categorial-grammar-combining/) [home](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/) / [papers](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/) / [2004](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/2004/page/2/) / Unificational Combinatory Categorial Grammar. Combining Information Structure and Discourse Representations # Unificational Combinatory Categorial Grammar. Combining Information Structure and Discourse Representations **Authors:** Maarika Traat and [Johan Bos](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/johan-bos/) · **Year:** 2004 · **Venue:** [COLING 2004: Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Computational Linguistics](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/coling/) ([COLING 2004](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/coling/2004/)) · **Publisher:** [International Committee on Computational Linguistics (ICCL)](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/publishers/international-committee-on-computational-linguistics-iccl/) · **Licence:** [CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 (ACL Anthology, before 2016)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/) **Links:** [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/C04-1043/) · [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/C04-1043.pdf) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W1964540781) **Citations:** 4 citations (OpenAlex, 2026-10-14) · 1 in our library, of the 149,439 papers whose bibliographies we read ## Summary Information structure (which part of an utterance is the known topic, the theme, and which is the new contribution, the rheme) is seldom built into practical grammars. Existing accounts tend to rely on higher-order logic, which makes inference hard, and they rarely specify enough compositional detail to implement. Traat and Bos propose Unificational Combinatory Categorial Grammar (UCCG). It takes the directional slashes, extra combinatory rules and intonation theory of Steedman's CCG and merges them with the feature-structure "signs" of Unification Categorial Grammar. Semantics is built in Discourse Representation Theory with neo-davidsonian events, which keeps the output first-order. Syntax and semantics are assembled together through unification. Prosodic markers (pitch accents and boundary tones) are treated as signs of their own. They combine with words and push theme, rheme and focus labels onto individual DRS conditions. The authors implemented a parser for a fragment of English. It reads prosodically annotated strings and outputs DRSs labelled with information structure. They present this as groundwork for spoken dialogue systems, where intonation suited to the context matters for speech synthesis. No corpus evaluation is reported. ## Key points - UCCG has only three basic categories: s, n and vp. A noun phrase is always the type-raised s/vp, which corresponds to CCG s/(s\np), so that quantifier scope can be fixed in the semantics. - Every sign must carry pho, cat and drs. Optional features include agr (fin/nonfin), var (individual referents), sit (eventualities), inf (information-structure status) and foc (focus). - Four combinatory rules are implemented: forward and backward application, and forward and backward composition. Other CCG rules are described as easy to add. - Theme accent L+H* and rheme accent H* mark DRS conditions with θ or ρ plus a focus flag (+/−). Boundary tones LH% and LL% turn a unit into a full phrase (φ), and this label has no semantic effect. - Larger DRSs are built with the merge operator, followed by merge-reduction, which also renames referents to avoid variable clashes. The worked example is "Anna L+H* LH% married Manny H* LL%". ## Interesting ideas - A single shared variable appears both in a sign's var/sit slots and inside its DRS conditions, so syntactic combination fills in predicate–argument structure with no separate semantic step. This makes every semantic link traceable to a specific unification. - Prosody is modelled as lexical-like signs (accents and boundary tones) that combine with words, instead of as an external annotation layer. Accents must attach to their word before anything else so the accented item is never lost. - Information-structure status is stored as a label on each DRS condition (theme/rheme, plus focus), not as a separate structure. Ordinary first-order meaning stays intact, and packaging is added on top of it. - Unmarked material defaults to the rheme rather than forcing an arbitrary decision, which gives a principled fallback for ambiguous input. - The example question "Who taught Alexander the Great?" judges an answer by whether its accent placement matches the question. This gives a natural test of whether an answer's focus fits what was asked. ## For Mova How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests: - **I1** (frames): Role assignment could bind the same referent ID in the UD-derived slot and in the VerbNet frame. Each who-did-what link would then carry its own proof of origin. - **I2** (tokens): Emphasis cues in text, such as capitals, italics or "it was X who", could become token-level markers attached before parsing. Focus would then be preserved for later stages. - **I3** (world): Facts in the text world could carry a given/new or focus tag. The world model then stays the same, while answer selection and generation can see what was asserted as news. - **I4** (frames): When no cue marks topic versus new information, a single documented default such as "treat as new" keeps the speech-act and implicature logic deterministic and explainable. - **I5** (back): Generation could check that the queried element is placed in focus position in the produced answer, and use mismatches as negative controls. *Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.* ## Institutions - [University of Edinburgh](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/universities/university-of-edinburgh/) — University, Edinburgh, United Kingdom · 359 works · 77,352 citations 📚 Shelves (4): [🖥️ Computer Science](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/computer-science/) · 16,667 works · [🤖 Artificial Intelligence](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/computer-science/artificial-intelligence/) · 16,194 works · [🎭 Arts and Humanities](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/arts-and-humanities/) · 16,039 works · [🗣️ Language and Linguistics](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/arts-and-humanities/language-and-linguistics/) · 15,891 works 🧭 Topics (1): [📐 Syntax & grammar formalisms](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/syntax-grammar/) · 214 works ## Cite Cite as: Maarika Traat and Johan Bos. 2004. Unificational Combinatory Categorial Grammar. Combining Information Structure and Discourse Representations. COLING 2004: Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Computational Linguistics. The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. ```bibtex @inproceedings{traat2004unificational, title = {{Unificational Combinatory Categorial Grammar. Combining Information Structure and Discourse Representations}}, author = {Maarika Traat and Johan Bos}, booktitle = {COLING 2004: Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Computational Linguistics}, year = {2004}, doi = {10.3115/1220355.1220398}, url = {https://doi.org/10.3115/1220355.1220398} } ``` - [← previous An overview of recent developments in the description of Biblical Hebrew relevant to Bible translation](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/merwe-2004-overview-recent-developments-description-biblical/) - [next → Prolegomena for the Sociolinguistics of Classical Hebrew](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/schniedewind-2005-prolegomena-sociolinguistics-classical-hebrew/) - [↑ back to papers of 2004](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/2004/page/2/) ## References 10 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet. 1.  Patrick Blackburn and Johan Bos. 2003. Computational semantics. Theoria, 18(46):27–45. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=%EF%A3%B9+Patrick+Blackburn+and+Johan+Bos%2E+2003%2E+Computational+semantics%2E+Theoria%2C+18%2846%29%3A27%E2%80%9345%2E) 2. Jonathan Calder, Ewan Klein, and Henk Zeevat. 1988. Unification categorial grammar: A concise, extendable grammar for natural language processing. In Proceedings of the 12th International Conerence on Computational Linguistics, Budapest, August. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Jonathan+Calder%2C+Ewan+Klein%2C+and+Henk+Zeevat%2E+1988%2E+Unification+categorial+grammar%3A+A+concise%2C+extendable+grammar+for+natural+language+processing%2E+In+Proceedings+of+the+12th+International+Conerence+on) 3. Hans Kamp and Uwe Reyle. 1993. From Discourse to Logic. Kluwer Academic Publishers, London. [↗](https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-2066-1) 4. Manfred Krifka. 1993. Focus and Presupposition in Dynamic Interpretation. Journal of Semantics, 10(4):269–300. [↗](https://doi.org/10.1093/jos/10.4.269) 5. Ivana Kruijff-Korbayova. 1998. The Dynamic Potential of Topic and Focus: A Praguian Approach to Discourse Representation Theory. Ph.D. thesis, Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Charles University, Prague. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Ivana+Kruijff%2DKorbayova%2E+1998%2E+The+Dynamic+Potential+of+Topic+and+Focus%3A+A+Praguian+Approach+to+Discourse+Representation+Theory%2E+Ph%2ED%2E+thesis%2C+Faculty+of+Mathematics+and+Physics%2C+Charles+University%2C+P) 6. Janet Pierrehumbert. 1980. The Phonology and Phonetics of English Intonation. Ph.D. thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Bloomington, IN. Published 1988 by Indiana University Linguistics Club. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Janet+Pierrehumbert%2E+1980%2E+The+Phonology+and+Phonetics+of+English+Intonation%2E+Ph%2ED%2E+thesis%2C+Massachusetts+Institute+of+Technology%2C+Bloomington%2C+IN%2E+Published+1988+by+Indiana+University+Linguistics+Clu) 7. Mark Steedman. 1990. Gapping as constituent coordination. Linguistics and Philosophy, 13. [↗](https://doi.org/10.1007/bf00630734) 8. Mark Steedman. 2000. The Syntactic Process. The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts. [↗](https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/6591.001.0001) 9. Mary McGee Wood. 2000. Syntax in categorial grammar: An introduction for linguists. ESS-LLI 2000, Birmingham, England. ESSLLI coursebook. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Mary+McGee+Wood%2E+2000%2E+Syntax+in+categorial+grammar%3A+An+introduction+for+linguists%2E+ESS%2DLLI+2000%2C+Birmingham%2C+England%2E+ESSLLI+coursebook%2E) 10. Henk Zeevat. 1988. Combining categorial grammar and unification. In U.Reyle and C.Rohrer, editors, Natural Language Parsing and Linguistic Theories. D.Reidel Publishing Company. [↗](https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-1337-0_8) *Updated 1 November 2026*