1993 ParsingEnglishWithALinkGrammar
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- (Sleator & Temperley, 1993) ⇒ Daniel D. Sleator, and Davy Temperley. (1993). “Parsing English with a Link Grammar.” In: Proceedings of the Third International Workshop on Parsing Technologies.
Subject Headings: Link Grammar, Natural Language Syntactic Parsing
Notes
- It proposes a new syntactic parser of English (associated to a simple and original theory of English syntax).
- Its parser a highly lexicalized grammar.
- Set of words are the terminal symbols of the grammar.
- Given a sentence, the system assigns to it a syntactic structure, which consists of a set of labeled links connecting pairs of words.
- The parser also produces a "constituent" representation of a sentence (showing noun phrases, verb phrases, etc.).
- It has a freely available implementation. Available at http://hyper.link.cs.cmu.edu/link
- Because it is lexicalized it will encounter a problem with data sparseness.
- The words of a syntactic structure are connected in such a way, that the links satisfy the linking requirements for each word of the sentence (satisfaction) that the links do not cross (planarity) and that all words form a connected graph (connectivity).
- ... a lexical dependency based parser which has little functional information.
- The Link Grammar Parser is a syntactic parser of English, based on link grammar, an original theory of English syntax. Given a sentence, the system assigns to it a syntactic structure, which consists of a set of labeled links connecting pairs of words. The parser also produces a "constituent" representation of a sentence (showing noun phrases, verb phrases, etc.). Another reason for my interest is that there is a freely available implementation” http://hyper.link.cs.cmu.edu/link/
- Properties of sentences in the grammar:
- Planarity: the links do not cross (when drawn above the words)
- Connectivity: The links suffice to connect all the words of the sequence together.
- Satisfaction: The links satisfy the linking requires of each word in the sequence.
- The linking requirements of each word are contained in a dictionary.
- Link grammar parsing can handle many syntactic structures and is computationally relatively efficient. We experimented on a sample MEDLINE corpus. Although the parser was originally developed for conversational English and made many mistakes in parsing sentences from the biochemical domain, it nevertheless achieved better overall performance than a co-occurrence-only method.
- Link grammar was first introduced by Sleator and Temperley to simplify English grammar with a contextfree grammar. The basic idea of link grammar is to connect pairs of words in a sentence with various links. Each word is viewed as a block with connectors coming out. There are various types of connectors, and connectors may point to the right or to the left. A valid sentence may have more than one complete linkage, just as a sentence may have several meanings.
- Grinberg et al. developed a robust parser to implement the link grammar. It has a dictionary of about 60,000 words, and can recognize a wide range of English syntactic phenomena: noun-verb agreement, questions, imperatives, complex and irregular verbs, many types of nouns, past- or present-participles in noun phrases, commas, a variety of adjective types, prepositions, adverbs, relative clauses, possessives, coordinating conjunctions, and others. The parser was tested on a corpus of English telephone conversations. Its robustness was demonstrated by its ability to handle many “ungrammatical” sentences and sentence fragments. If a complete linkage cannot be found, the parser will try to form a “partial linkage” by ignoring one or more of the words in the sentence. The parser has an internal timer. If the timer runs down before a complete or partial linkage has been found, the parser will output whatever it has found so far (termed a fragmented linkage).
Cited By
2003
1995
Quotes
Abstract
We develop a formal grammatical system called a link grammar, show how English grammar can be encoded in such a system, and give algorithms for efficiently parsing with a link grammar. Although the expressive power of link grammars is equivalent to that of context free grammars, encoding natural language grammars appears to be much easier with the new system. We have written a program for general link parsing and written a link grammar for the English language. The performance of this preliminary system – both in the breadth of English phenomena that it captures and in the computational resources used – indicates that the approach may have practical uses as well as linguistic significance. Our program is written in C and may be obtained through the internet.
References
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- Daniel Sleator and Davy Temperley. 1991. Parsing English with a Link Grammar. Carnegie Mellon University Computer Science technical report CMU-CS-91-196, October 1991.
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- (Melcuk, 1988) ⇒ Ivan Melcuk. (1988). “Dependency Syntax: Theory and Practice.” State University of New York Press.
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