To simultaneously handle syntactic and semantic ambiguity, we propose using the shared-packed parse forest of Seo and Simmons (1989) in conjunction with the logical form representation of a sentence developed by Harper (1990). If the packed parse forest is used alone, informed decisions about semantic ambiguities cannot be made while addressing syntactic ambiguities. If logical form alone is used, all syntactic ambiguities must be resolved before providing the logical form for the sentence. Logical form can be specified precisely given a parse tree, but with a parser that provides one parse tree at a time, finding the correct parse tree requires exponential time. The algorithm resulting from the wedding of logical form to packed forests will produce a compact intermediate representation for an ambiguous sentence in polynomial time. As syntactic and semantic ambiguity are mutually constraining, maintaining both in the intermediate representation should focilitate their inter- effectiveness. As more information is processed this intermediate representation will be incrementally updated until the parse forest is reduced to a single tree containing one logical form. In addition, the modularity of this approach will reduce the conceptual complexity of the natural language problem.
