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

Concurrent Lexicalized Dependency Parsing: A Behavioral View on ParseTalk Events

The behavioral specification of an object-oriented grammar model is considered. The model is based on full lexicalization, head-orientation via valency constraints and dependency relations, inheritance as a means for non-redundant lexicon specification, and concurrency of computation. The computation model relies upon the actor paradigm, with concurrency entering through asynchronous message passing between actors. In particular, we here elaborate on principles of how the global behavior of a lexically distributed grammar and its corresponding parser can be specified in terms of event type networks and event networks, resp.Comment: 68kB, 5pages Postscrip

Connectionist natural language parsing

The key developments of two decades of connectionist parsing are reviewed. Connectionist parsers are assessed according to their ability to learn to represent syntactic structures from examples automatically, without being presented with symbolic grammar rules. This review also considers the extent to which connectionist parsers offer computational models of human sentence processing and provide plausible accounts of psycholinguistic data. In considering these issues, special attention is paid to the level of realism, the nature of the modularity, and the type of processing that is to be found in a wide range of parsers

Automatic treebank-based acquisition of Arabic LFG dependency structures

A number of papers have reported on methods for the automatic acquisition of large-scale, probabilistic LFG-based grammatical resources from treebanks for English (Cahill and al., 2002), (Cahill and al., 2004), German (Cahill and al., 2003), Chinese (Burke, 2004), (Guo and al., 2007), Spanish (O’Donovan, 2004), (Chrupala and van Genabith, 2006) and French (Schluter and van Genabith, 2008). Here, we extend the LFG grammar acquisition approach to Arabic and the Penn Arabic Treebank (ATB) (Maamouri and Bies, 2004), adapting and extending the methodology of (Cahill and al., 2004) originally developed for English. Arabic is challenging because of its morphological richness and syntactic complexity. Currently 98% of ATB trees (without FRAG and X) produce a covering and connected f-structure. We conduct a qualitative evaluation of our annotation against a gold standard and achieve an f-score of 95%

Parallel Distributed Grammar Engineering for Practical Applications

Based on a detailed case study of parallel grammar development distributed across two sites, we review some of the requirements for regression testing in grammar engineering, summarize our approach to systematic competence and performance profiling, and discuss our experience with grammar development for a commercial application. If possible, the workshop presentation will be organized around a software demonstration