Efficient probabilistic top-down and left-corner parsing

2000/08/21 by Brian Roark, Mark Johnson
Computer Science · #cs.CL

paper · pdf

published as Proceedings of the 37th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 1999, pages 421-428 · 8 pages, 3 tables, 3 figures

arxiv created 2000/08/21 · arxiv updated 2009/11/30

Abstract

This paper examines efficient predictive broad-coverage parsing without dynamic programming. In contrast to bottom-up methods, depth-first top-down parsing produces partial parses that are fully connected trees spanning the entire left context, from which any kind of non-local dependency or partial semantic interpretation can in principle be read. We contrast two predictive parsing approaches, top-down and left-corner parsing, and find both to be viable. In addition, we find that enhancement with non-local information not only improves parser accuracy, but also substantially improves the search efficiency.

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