Grammatical Heads Optimized for Parsing and Their Comparison with Linguistic Intuition

Abstract. This paper deals with head-driven chart parsing on large natural-language grammars. We present a procedure that optimizes positions of heads in the grammar rules based on the number of edges in the resulting chart. New performance evaluation tool PACE is briefly introduced first. The head-optimizing procedure is described and the results are given. The last part compares the head positions obtained automatically with those set according to traditional linguistics.