Abstract
This chapter presents a probabilistic extension of Discontinuous Phrase Structure Grammar (DPSG), a formalism designed to describe discontinuous constituency phenomena adequately and perspicuously by means of trees with crossing branches. We outline an implementation of an agenda-based chart parsing algorithm that is capable of computing the Most Probable Parse for a given input sentence for probabilistic versions of both DPSG and Context-Free Grammar. Experiments were conducted with both types of grammars extracted from the NEGRA corpus. In spite of the much greater complexity of DPSG parsing in terms of the number of (partial) analyses that can be constructed for an input sentence, accuracy results from both experiments are comparable. We also briefly hint at possible future lines of research aimed at more efficient ways of probabilistic parsing with discontinuous constituents.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Blevins, J. P. (1990). Syntactic Complexity: Evidence for Discontinuity and Multidomination. PhD thesis, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA.
Brants, T. (1999). Tagging and Parsing with Cascaded Markov Models — Automation of Corpus Annotation. PhD thesis, University of the Saarland, Saarbrücken, Germany.
Bresnan, J., Kaplan, R. M., Peters, S., and Zaenen, A. (1982). Cross-serial dependencies in Dutch. Linguistic Inquiry, 13(4):613–635.
Bunt, H. (1991). Parsing with Discontinuous Phrase Structure Grammar. In Tomita, M., editor, Current Issues in Parsing Technology, pages 49–63. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, Boston, London.
Bunt, H. (1996). Formal tools for describing and processing discontinuous constituency structure. In Bunt, H. and van Horck, A., editors, Discontinuous Constituency, Natural Language Processing 6, pages 63–83. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin, New York.
Bunt, H. and van der Sloot, K. (1996). Parsing as dynamic interpretation of feature structures. In Bunt, H. and Tomita, M., editors, Recent Advances in Parsing Technology, Text, Speech and Language Technology 1, pages 91–114. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, Boston, London.
Charniak, E. and Caraballo, S. (1998). New figures of merit for best-first probabilistic chart parsing. Computational Linguistics, 24(2):275–298.
Charniak, E., Goldwater, S., and Johnson, M. (1998). Edge-basedbest-first chart parsing. In Proceedings of the Sixth Workshop on Very Large Corpora, Montreal, Canada.
Johnson, M. (1985). Parsing with discontinuous constituents. In Proceedings of the 23rd ACL meeting, pages 127–132, Chicago. Association for Computational Linguistics.
McCawley, J. D. (1982). Parentheticals and discontinuous constituent structure. Linguistic Inquiry, 13(1):91–106.
Müller, S. (1999). Restricting discontinuity. In Proceedings of the 5th Natural Language Processing Pacific Rim Symposium 1999 (NLPRS’ 99), Peking.
Plaehn, O. (1999). Probabilistic parsing with Discontinuous Phrase Structure Grammar. Diplom thesis, University of the Saarland, Saarbrücken. http://www.coli.uni-sb.de/~plaehn/papers/dt.html.
Ratnaparkhi, A. (1997). A linear observed time statistical parser based on maximum entropy models. In Proceedings of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing EMNLP-97, Providence, RI.
Reape, M. (1991). Parsing bounded discontinuous constituents: Generalisations of some common algorithms. In van der Wouden, T. and Sijtsma, W., editors, Computational Linguistics in the Netherlands. Papers from the First CLIN-meeting, Utrecht. Utrecht University-OTS.
Skut, W., Krenn, B., Brants, T, and Uszkoreit, H. (1997). An annotation scheme for free word order languages. In Proceedings of the Fifth Conference on Applied Natural Language Processing ANLP-97, Washington, DC.
van der Sloot, K. (1990). The TENDUM 2.7 parsing algorithm for DPSG. ITK research memo, ITK, Tilburg.
Vogel, C. and Erjavec, T. (1994). Restricted Discontinuous Phrase Structure Grammar and its ramifications. In Martin-Vide, C., editor, Current Issues in Mathematical Linguistics, pages 131–140. Elsevier, Amsterdam.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Plaehn, O. (2004). Computing the Most Probable Parse for a Discontinuous Phrase Structure Grammar. In: Bunt, H., Carroll, J., Satta, G. (eds) New Developments in Parsing Technology. Text, Speech and Language Technology, vol 23. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/1-4020-2295-6_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/1-4020-2295-6_5
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-1-4020-2293-7
Online ISBN: 978-1-4020-2295-1
eBook Packages: Humanities, Social Sciences and Law