Eliminative Parsing with Graded Constraints

Johannes Heinecke, Jürgen Kunze, Wolfgang Menzel, Ingo Schröder

Abstract: Natural language parsing is conceived to be a procedure of disambiguation, which successively reduces an initially totally ambiguous structural representation towards a single interpretation. Graded constraints are used as means to express well-formedness conditions of different strength and to decide which partial structures are locally least preferred and, hence, can be deleted. This approach facilitates a higher degree of robustness of the analysis, allows to introduce resource adaptivity into the parsing procedure, and exhibits a high potential for parallelization of the computation.