On control strategies and incrementality in unification-based chart parsing

Abstract:

This thesis is a compilation of three papers dealing with aspects of context-free- and unification-based chart parsing of natural language. The first paper contains a survey and an empirical comparison of rule-invocation strategies in context-free chart parsing. The second paper describes a chart parser for a unification-based formalism (PATR) which is control-strategy-independent in the sense that rule invocation, search, and parsing direction are parametrized. The third paper describes a technique for incremental chart parsing (under PATR) and outlines how this fits into continued work aimed at developing a parsing system which is both interactive and incremental.