A Robust Parsing Algorithm For Link Grammars

In this paper we present a robust parsing algorithm based on the link grammar formalism for parsing natural languages. Our algorithm is a natural extension of the original dynamic programming recognition algorithm which recursively counts the number of linkages between two words in the input sentence. The modified algorithm uses the notion of a null link in order to allow a connection between any pair of adjacent words, regardless of their dictionary definitions. The algorithm proceeds by making three dynamic programming passes. In the first pass, the input is parsed using the original algorithm which enforces the constraints on links to ensure grammaticality. In the second pass, the total cost of each substring of words is computed, where cost is determined by the number of null links necessary to parse the substring. The final pass counts the total number of parses with minimal cost. All of the original pruning techniques have natural counterparts in the robust algorithm. When used together with memoization, these techniques enable the algorithm to run efficiently with cubic worst-case complexity. We have implemented these ideas and tested them by parsing the Switchboard corpus of conversational English. This corpus is comprised of approximately three million words of text, corresponding to more than 150 hours of transcribed speech collected from telephone conversations restricted to 70 different topics. Although only a small fraction of the sentences in this corpus are "grammatical" by standard criteria, the robust link grammar parser is able to extract relevant structure for a large portion of the sentences. We present the results of our experiments using this system, including the analyses of selected and random sentences from the corpus.Comment: 17 pages, compressed postscrip

Structural parsing

Parsing is an essential part of natural language processing. In this paper, structural parsing, which is based on the theory of knowledge graphs, is introduced. Under consideration of the semantic and syntactic features of natural language, both semantic and syntactic word graphs are formed. Grammar rules are derived from the syntactic word graphs. Due to the distinctions between Chinese and English, the grammar rules are given for the Chinese version and the English version of syntactic word graphs respectively. By traditional parsing a parse tree can then be given for a sentence, that can be used to map the sentence on a sentence graph. This is called structural parsing. The relationship with utterance paths is discussed. As a result, chunk indicators are proposed to guide structural parsing

Adapting a general parser to a sublanguage

In this paper, we propose a method to adapt a general parser (Link Parser) to sublanguages, focusing on the parsing of texts in biology. Our main proposal is the use of terminology (identication and analysis of terms) in order to reduce the complexity of the text to be parsed. Several other strategies are explored and finally combined among which text normalization, lexicon and morpho-guessing module extensions and grammar rules adaptation. We compare the parsing results before and after these adaptations

Learning Language from a Large (Unannotated) Corpus

A novel approach to the fully automated, unsupervised extraction of dependency grammars and associated syntax-to-semantic-relationship mappings from large text corpora is described. The suggested approach builds on the authors' prior work with the Link Grammar, RelEx and OpenCog systems, as well as on a number of prior papers and approaches from the statistical language learning literature. If successful, this approach would enable the mining of all the information needed to power a natural language comprehension and generation system, directly from a large, unannotated corpus.Comment: 29 pages, 5 figures, research proposa

Lexical Adaptation of Link Grammar to the Biomedical Sublanguage: a Comparative Evaluation of Three Approaches

We study the adaptation of Link Grammar Parser to the biomedical sublanguage with a focus on domain terms not found in a general parser lexicon. Using two biomedical corpora, we implement and evaluate three approaches to addressing unknown words: automatic lexicon expansion, the use of morphological clues, and disambiguation using a part-of-speech tagger. We evaluate each approach separately for its effect on parsing performance and consider combinations of these approaches. In addition to a 45% increase in parsing efficiency, we find that the best approach, incorporating information from a domain part-of-speech tagger, offers a statistically signicant 10% relative decrease in error. The adapted parser is available under an open-source license at http://www.it.utu.fi/biolg

On Parsing CHILDES

Research on child language acquisition would benefit from the availability of a large body of syntactically parsed utterances between parents and children. We consider the problem of generating such a ``treebank'' from the CHILDES corpus, which currently contains primarily orthographically transcribed speech tagged for lexical category