PARSING TECHNIQUES

Abstract

‘Parsing’ is the term used to describe the process of automatically building syntactic
analyses of a sentence in terms of a given grammar and lexicon. The resulting syntactic
analyses may be used as input to a process of semantic interpretation, (or perhaps
phonological interpretation, where aspects of this, like prosody, are sensitive to syntactic
structure). Occasionally, ‘parsing’ is also used to include both syntactic and semantic analysis.
We use it in the more conservative sense here, however. In most contemporary grammatical
formalisms, the output of parsing is something logically equivalent to a tree, displaying
dominance and precedence relations between constituents of a sentence, perhaps with further
annotations in the form of attribute-value equations (‘features’) capturing other aspects of
linguistic description. However, there are many different possible linguistic formalisms, and
many ways of representing each of them, and hence many different ways of representing the
results of parsing. We shall assume here a simple tree representation, and an underlying
context-free grammatical (CFG) formalism