Proof nets for controlling ambiguity in natural language processing

We propose the use of two kinds of constraints in order to control the evaluation of ambiguous structures. The first ones concern the immediate context of the words. In case of ambiguity, these constraints form a network controlling an ambiguous area. The second kind of constraint relies on descriptions of the elementary trees that can be attached to the words. Such descriptions, called unary quasitrees, allow the representation of the dependency relations between the words. They form a proof net on which a filtering method can be applied in order to reduce the number of constraints. The elaboration of the constraint networks and its simplification rely on information available at the lexical level. So, the method presented here simplifies the control of the disambiguation without doing an actual parse and can be reused whatever the linguistic formalism