Technical reports

Three papers on parsing

B.K. Boguraev, K. Spärck Jones, J.I. Tait

1982, 22 pages

DOI: 10.48456/tr-17

Abstract

This collection of three papers examines current problems in the parsing of natural language. The first paper investigates the parsing of compound nouns, and suggests that the existing strategies are inadequate. Accepting that better approaches are needed, the paper then proceeds to examine the implications for natural language processing systems.

The second paper in the collection examines the task of recognising conjunctions within an ATN grammar. To do this only through the grammar specification is difficult and results in a bulky grammar. The paper therefore presents some ideas for extending the ATN mechanism to better deal with conjunctions.

The final paper considers ways in which semantic parsers can exploit syntactic constraints. Two specific semantic parsers are considered: those of Cater and Boguraev which are regarded as being representative of two styles of parsing. The main conclusion to be drawn is that there are significant disadvantages to semantic parsing without complete syntactic processing of the input.

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BibTeX record

@TechReport{UCAM-CL-TR-17,
  author =	 {Boguraev, B.K. and Sp{\"a}rck Jones, K. and Tait, J.I.},
  title = 	 {{Three papers on parsing}},
  year = 	 1982,
  url = 	 {https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/techreports/UCAM-CL-TR-17.pdf},
  institution =  {University of Cambridge, Computer Laboratory},
  doi = 	 {10.48456/tr-17},
  number = 	 {UCAM-CL-TR-17}
}