Abstract

As a response to the requirements imposed by real-world natural language processing, we argue for a design of natural language grammars and their associated parsers in which declarative knowledge about language structure and procedural knowledge about language use are equally balanced within a strictly object-oriented specication and implementation framework. In particular, we introduce fundamental message-passing protocols for object-oriented parsing, which include, besides the one for basic dependency parsing, protocols for ambiguity handling, robustness, backtracking, preferential and predictive parsing, as well as textual reference resolution. Based on an empirical evaluation, we also provide reasons for sacricing completeness of the parse in favor of efficiency gains.

Citations