Author : Nick Abercrombie Andrews
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 150 pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (117 download)
Book Synopsis A Bitwise Approach to Parsing with a Unification Grammar by : Nick Abercrombie Andrews
Download or read book A Bitwise Approach to Parsing with a Unification Grammar written by Nick Abercrombie Andrews and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page 150 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The principal concern of the thesis is to develop an approach to the parsing of natural language which uses as much parallel computation as possible on a standard computer. This approach exploits data structures based on machine-word-level binary representations to provide fast ways to implement the time-consuming data-combining operations which are required during parsing. The practical research centres on grammars in two forms; Context Free Grammars and Definite Clause Grammars. The thesis describes algorithms for parsing both sorts of grammar, and the practical performance of software implementing these algorithms is examined. The thesis shows how in online chart-parsing algorithms left-context filtering can be imposed with very little overhead, using binary techniques. The method is illustrated using a CFG taken from Tomita's exposition of his well-known nondeterministic LR parsing method. CFG parsing provides a foundation in the thesis for the treatment of Unification Grammars by means of a context-free skeleton. Machine-word-level binary techniques of achieving left-context filtering continue to be used in the UG chart parser developed in the later part of the thesis. A binary method of representing features and their values is also exploited, allowing very fast unification. The object form of the ANLT unification grammar, an example of DCGs, is employed to test the author's software which uses these binary data structures. The software achieves a considerable speed-up in the parsing process when compared with other published results. The results section is followed by a number of suggestions for further enhancing performance.