Linton Miller's Thesis
Flexible Table-Driven Parsing for Natural Language Processing
Linton Miller
1994
Submitted for the degree of Master of Science in Computer Science
Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand
Ambiguity is a major difficulty for natural language processing (NLP)
systems. The longer that ambiguities in a sentence remain unresolved, the
more work an NLP system may perform in considering alternative
interpretations of the sentence. Thus, for efficiency, an NLP system should
resolve ambiguities as early as possible in processing.
This thesis describes L* parsing - an algorithm for table-driven
parsing, designed to permit efficient processing of natural language by
facilitating the early resolution of ambiguity. The algorithm is a
generalisation of GLR parsing that allows grammar rules to be used whenever
they may provide useful syntactic information to an NLP system.
L* parsing defines a general framework for specifying a variety of
parser control strategies. Different control strategies can be expressed by
specifying exactly when grammar rules are to be used. This thesis presents
one possible control strategy, designed to provide syntactic information
that enables useful semantic and pragmatic processing, and describes a method
of compiling this strategy into a parse table.
Last updated
08 Nov 2009 04:37 PM
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