A structure-sharing parser for lexicalized grammars

In wide-coverage lexicalized grammars many of the elementary structures have substructures in common. This means that in conventional parsing algorithms some of the computation associated with different structures is duplicated. In this paper we describe a precompilation technique for such grammars which allows some of this computation to be shared. In our approach the elementary structures of the grammar are transformed into finite state automata which can be merged and minimised using standard algorithms, and then parsed using an automatonbased parser. We present algorithms for constructing automata from elementary structures, merging and minimising them, and string recognition and parse recovery with the resulting grammar

Evaluation of LTAG parsing with supertag compaction

One of the biggest concerns that has been raised over the feasibility of using large-scale LTAGs in NLP is the amount of redundancy within a grammar¿s elementary tree set. This has led to various proposals on how best to represent grammars in a way that makes them compact and easily maintained (Vijay-Shanker and Schabes, 1992; Becker, 1993; Becker, 1994; Evans, Gazdar and Weir, 1995; Candito, 1996). Unfortunately, while this work can help to make the storage of grammars more efficient, it does nothing to prevent the problem reappearing when the grammar is processed by a parser and the complete set of trees is reproduced. In this paper we are concerned with an approach that addresses this problem of computational redundancy in the trees, and evaluate its effectiveness

Lexicalization and Grammar Development

In this paper we present a fully lexicalized grammar formalism as a particularly attractive framework for the specification of natural language grammars. We discuss in detail Feature-based, Lexicalized Tree Adjoining Grammars (FB-LTAGs), a representative of the class of lexicalized grammars. We illustrate the advantages of lexicalized grammars in various contexts of natural language processing, ranging from wide-coverage grammar development to parsing and machine translation. We also present a method for compact and efficient representation of lexicalized trees.Comment: ps file. English w/ German abstract. 10 page

Concurrent Lexicalized Dependency Parsing: The ParseTalk Model

A grammar model for concurrent, object-oriented natural language parsing is introduced. Complete lexical distribution of grammatical knowledge is achieved building upon the head-oriented notions of valency and dependency, while inheritance mechanisms are used to capture lexical generalizations. The underlying concurrent computation model relies upon the actor paradigm. We consider message passing protocols for establishing dependency relations and ambiguity handling.Comment: 90kB, 7pages Postscrip

Developing a TT-MCTAG for German with an RCG-based parser

Developing linguistic resources, in particular grammars, is known to be a complex task in itself, because of (amongst others) redundancy and consistency issues. Furthermore some languages can reveal themselves hard to describe because of specific characteristics, e.g. the free word order in German. In this context, we present (i) a framework allowing to describe tree-based grammars, and (ii) an actual fragment of a core multicomponent tree-adjoining grammar with tree tuples (TT-MCTAG) for German developed using this framework. This framework combines a metagrammar compiler and a parser based on range concatenation grammar (RCG) to respectively check the consistency and the correction of the grammar. The German grammar being developed within this framework already deals with a wide range of scrambling and extraction phenomena

Interaction Grammars

Interaction Grammar (IG) is a grammatical formalism based on the notion of polarity. Polarities express the resource sensitivity of natural languages by modelling the distinction between saturated and unsaturated syntactic structures. Syntactic composition is represented as a chemical reaction guided by the saturation of polarities. It is expressed in a model-theoretic framework where grammars are constraint systems using the notion of tree description and parsing appears as a process of building tree description models satisfying criteria of saturation and minimality

Principles and Implementation of Deductive Parsing

We present a system for generating parsers based directly on the metaphor of parsing as deduction. Parsing algorithms can be represented directly as deduction systems, and a single deduction engine can interpret such deduction systems so as to implement the corresponding parser. The method generalizes easily to parsers for augmented phrase structure formalisms, such as definite-clause grammars and other logic grammar formalisms, and has been used for rapid prototyping of parsing algorithms for a variety of formalisms including variants of tree-adjoining grammars, categorial grammars, and lexicalized context-free grammars.Comment: 69 pages, includes full Prolog cod

Parsing With Lexicalized Tree Adjoining Grammar

Most current linguistic theories give lexical accounts of several phenomena that used to be considered purely syntactic. The information put in the lexicon is thereby increased in both amount and complexity: see, for example, lexical rules in LFG (Kaplan and Bresnan, 1983), GPSG (Gazdar, Klein, Pullum and Sag, 1985), HPSG (Pollard and Sag, 1987), Combinatory Categorial Grammars (Steedman, 1987), Karttunen\u27s version of Categorial Grammar (Karttunen 1986, 1988), some versions of GB theory (Chomsky 1981), and Lexicon-Grammars (Gross 1984). We would like to take into account this fact while defining a formalism. We therefore explore the view that syntactical rules are not separated from lexical items. We say that a grammar is lexicalized (Schabes, AbeilK and Joshi, 1988) if it consists of: (1) a finite set of structures each associated with lexical items; each lexical item will be called the anchor of the corresponding structure; the structures define the domain of locality over which constraints are specified; (2) an operation or operations for composing the structures. The notion of anchor is closely related to the word associated with a functor-argument category in Categorial Grammars. Categorial Grammar (as used for example by Steedman, 1987) are \u27lexicalized\u27 according to our definition since each basic category has a lexical item associated with it

Coordination in Tree Adjoining Grammars: Formalization and Implementation

In this paper we show that an account for coordination can be constructed using the derivation structures in a lexicalized Tree Adjoining Grammar (LTAG). We present a notion of derivation in LTAGs that preserves the notion of fixed constituency in the LTAG lexicon while providing the flexibility needed for coordination phenomena. We also discuss the construction of a practical parser for LTAGs that can handle coordination including cases of non-constituent coordination.Comment: 6 pages, 16 Postscript figures, uses colap.sty. To appear in the proceedings of COLING 199

Enhancing practical TAG parsing efficiency by capturing redundancy

International audienceParsing efficiency within the context of tree adjoining grammars (TAGs) depends not only on the size of the input sentence but also, linearly, on the size of the input TAG, which can attain several thousands of elementary trees. We propose a factorized, finite-state TAG representation which copes with this combinatorial explosion. The associated parsing algorithm substantially increases the parsing performance on a real-size French TAG grammar