Abstract

in 1990, it advocates a much more empirical approach to natural language parsing than was common at that time. 1.1 The Problem Scha notes how Chomsky makes a sharp distinction between a formal grammar that defines the set of grammatical sentences in a language and the use of that language in a community, sloppiness and mistakes included. The former is usually referred to by Chomsky as “competence”, and the latter as “performance.” Scha then questions how useful this distinction is for contemporary natural language processing systems. He first points out how linguistic theory and practical NLP systems have converged on context free grammars as a respectable theoretical model of natural language syntax also having efficient parsing algorithms. Scha then goes on to point out some drawbacks of using context free grammars to model natural language syntax. First, trying to account for more phenomena by adding rules to a grammar

Citations