Trading off Completeness for Efficiency - The PARSETALK Performance Grammar Approach to Real-World Text Parsing

We argue for a performance-based design of natural language grammars and their associated parsers in order to meet the constraints posed by real-world natural language understanding. This approach incorporates declarative and procedural knowledge about language and language use within an object-oriented specification framework. We discuss several message passing protocols for real-world text parsing and provide reasons for sacrificing completeness of the parse in favor of efficiency. 1 INTRODUCTION Over the past decades the design of natural language grammars and their parsers was almost entirely based on competence considerations (Chomsky, 1965). These hailed pure declarativism (Shieber, 1986) and banned procedural aspects of natural language use out of the domain of language theory proper. The major premises of that approach were to consider sentences as the primary linguistic object of investigation, to focus on syntactic descriptions, and to rely upon perfectly well-formed uttera..