Current Issues In Parsing Technology

Current Issues in Parsing Technology

Recent Advances in Parsing Technology

In Marcus (1980), deterministic parsers were introduced. These are parsers which satisfy the conditions of Marcus's determinism hypothesis, i.e., they are strongly deterministic in the sense that they do not simulate non determinism in any way. In later work (Marcus et al. 1983) these parsers were modified to construct descriptions of trees rather than the trees them selves. The resulting D-theory parsers, by working with these descriptions, are capable of capturing a certain amount of ambiguity in the structures they build. In this context, it is not clear what it means for a parser to meet the conditions of the determinism hypothesis. The object of this work is to clarify this and other issues pertaining to D-theory parsers and to provide a framework within which these issues can be examined formally. Thus we have a very narrow scope. We make no ar guments about the linguistic issues D-theory parsers are meant to address, their relation to other parsing formalisms or the notion of determinism in general. Rather we focus on issues internal to D-theory parsers themselves.

New Developments in Parsing Technology

Parsing can be defined as the decomposition of complex structures into their constituent parts, and parsing technology as the methods, the tools, and the software to parse automatically. Parsing is a central area of research in the automatic processing of human language. Parsers are being used in many application areas, for example question answering, extraction of information from text, speech recognition and understanding, and machine translation. New developments in parsing technology are thus widely applicable. This book contains contributions from many of today's leading researchers in the area of natural language parsing technology. The contributors describe their most recent work and a diverse range of techniques and results. This collection provides an excellent picture of the current state of affairs in this area. This volume is the third in a series of such collections, and its breadth of coverage should make it suitable both as an overview of the current state ofthe field for graduate students, and as a reference for established researchers.