Building a Parser that Can Afford to Interact with Semantics

Book One

Volume

Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 12

Student Abstracts

Natural language understanding programs get bogged down by the multiplicity of possible syntactic structures while processing real world texts that human understanders do not have much difficulty with. In this work, I analyze the relationships between parsing strategies, the degree of local ambiguity encountered by them, and semantic feedback to syntax, and propose a parsing algorithm called Head-Signaled Left Corner Parsing (HSLC) that minimizes local ambiguities while supporting interactive syntactic and semantic analysis. Such a parser has been implemented in a sentence understanding program called COMPERE .