LHIP: Extended DCGs for Configurable Robust Parsing

We present LHIP, a system for incremental grammar development using an extended DCG formalism. The system uses a robust island-based parsing method controlled by user-defined performance thresholds.Comment: 10 pages, in Proc. Coling9

Message-Passing Protocols for Real-World Parsing -- An Object-Oriented Model and its Preliminary Evaluation

We argue for a performance-based design of natural language grammars and their associated parsers in order to meet the constraints imposed by real-world NLP. Our approach incorporates declarative and procedural knowledge about language and language use within an object-oriented specification framework. We discuss several message-passing protocols for parsing and provide reasons for sacrificing completeness of the parse in favor of efficiency based on a preliminary empirical evaluation.Comment: 12 pages, uses epsfig.st

Neural Combinatory Constituency Parsing

東京都立大学Tokyo Metropolitan University博士（情報科学）doctoral thesi

An Efficient Implementation of the Head-Corner Parser

This paper describes an efficient and robust implementation of a bi-directional, head-driven parser for constraint-based grammars. This parser is developed for the OVIS system: a Dutch spoken dialogue system in which information about public transport can be obtained by telephone. After a review of the motivation for head-driven parsing strategies, and head-corner parsing in particular, a non-deterministic version of the head-corner parser is presented. A memoization technique is applied to obtain a fast parser. A goal-weakening technique is introduced which greatly improves average case efficiency, both in terms of speed and space requirements. I argue in favor of such a memoization strategy with goal-weakening in comparison with ordinary chart-parsers because such a strategy can be applied selectively and therefore enormously reduces the space requirements of the parser, while no practical loss in time-efficiency is observed. On the contrary, experiments are described in which head-corner and left-corner parsers implemented with selective memoization and goal weakening outperform `standard' chart parsers. The experiments include the grammar of the OVIS system and the Alvey NL Tools grammar. Head-corner parsing is a mix of bottom-up and top-down processing. Certain approaches towards robust parsing require purely bottom-up processing. Therefore, it seems that head-corner parsing is unsuitable for such robust parsing techniques. However, it is shown how underspecification (which arises very naturally in a logic programming environment) can be used in the head-corner parser to allow such robust parsing techniques. A particular robust parsing model is described which is implemented in OVIS.Comment: 31 pages, uses cl.st

Discontinuous Combinatory Constituency Parsing

AbstractWe extend a pair of continuous combinator-based constituency parsers (one binary and one multi-branching) into a discontinuous pair. Our parsers iteratively compose constituent vectors from word embeddings without any grammar constraints. Their empirical complexities are subquadratic. Our extension includes 1) a swap action for the orientation-based binary model and 2) biaffine attention for the chunker-based multi-branching model. In tests conducted with the Discontinuous Penn Treebank and TIGER Treebank, we achieved state-of-the-art discontinuous accuracy with a significant speed advantage

Mild context-sensitivity and tuple-based generalizations of context-free grammar

This paper classifies a family of grammar formalisms that extend context-free grammar by talking about tuples of terminal strings, rather than independently combining single terminal words into larger single phrases. These include a number of well-known formalisms, such as head grammar and linear context-free rewriting systems, but also a new formalism, (simple) literal movement grammar, which strictly extends the previously known formalisms, while preserving polynomial time recognizability. The descriptive capacity of simple literal movement grammars is illustrated both formally through a weak generative capacity argument and in a more practical sense by the description of conjunctive cross-serial relative clauses in Dutch. After sketching a complexity result and drawing a number of conclusions from the illustrations, it is then suggested that the notion of mild context-sensitivity currently in use, that depends on the rather loosely defined concept of constant growth, needs a modification to apply sensibly to the illustrated facts; an attempt at such a revision is proposed

Grammars and Processors

The paper discusses the role of grammars in sentence processing, and explores some consequences of the Strong Competence Hypothesis of Bresnan and Kaplan for combinatory theories of grammar