Abstract

We present an efficient, broad-coverage, principle-based parser for English. The parser has been implemented in C++ and runs on SUN Sparcstations with X-windows. It contains a lexicon with over 90,000 entries, constructed automatically by applying a set of extraction and conversion rules to entries from machine readable dictionaries. 1. Introduction Principle-based grammars, such as Government-Binding (GB) theory (Chomsky, 1981; Haegeman, 1991), offer many advantages over rule-based and unificationbased grammars, such as the universality of principles and modularity of components in the grammar. Principles are constraints over X-bar structures. Most previous principle-based parsers, e.g., (Dorr, 1991; Fong, 1991; Johnson, 1991), essentially generate all possible X-bar structures of a sentence and then use the principles to filter out the illicit ones. The drawback of this approach is the inefficiency due to the large number of candidate structures to be filtered out. The problem persi...

Citations

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