Simplifying deterministic parsing

  • Authors:
  • Alan W. Carter;Michael J. Frelling

  • Affiliations:
  • University of British Columbia, Vancouver, B.C.;Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR

  • Venue:
  • ACL '84 Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Computational Linguistics and 22nd annual meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics
  • Year:
  • 1984

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Abstract

This paper presents a model for deterministic parsing which was designed to simplify the task of writing and understanding a deterministic grammar. While retaining structures and operations similar to those of Marcus' PARSIFAL parser [Marcus 80] the grammar language incorporates the following changes. (1) The use of productions operating in parallel has essentially been eliminated and instead the productions are organized into sequences. Not only does this improve the understandability of the grammar, it is felt that this organization corresponds more closely to the task of performing the sequence of buffer transformations and attachments required to parse the most common constituent types. (2) A general method for interfacing between the parser and a semantic representation system is introduced. This interface is independent of the particular semantic representation used and hides all details of the semantic processing from the grammar writer. (3) The interface also provides a general method for dealing with syntactic ambiguities which arise from the attachment of optional modifiers such as prepositional phrases. This frees the grammar writer from determining each point at which such ambiguities can occur.