We describe a stochastic approach to partial parsing, i.e., the recognition of syntactic structures of limited depth. The technique utilises Markov Models, but goes beyond usual bracketing approaches, since it is capable of recognising not only the boundaries, but also the internal structure and syntactic category of simple as well as complex NP's, PP's, AP's and adverbials. We compare tagging accuracy for different applications and encoding schemes.
In section , we sketched the simple bracketing technique described by , which provided motivation for our chunking method. As far as other approaches are concerned, our work is most closely related to that of , who use Markov Models in a preprocessing step to reduce the number of tree segments (called supertags ) that can be assigned to a word in a lexicalised Tree Adjoining Grammar. This approach makes parsing more efficient, but it needs a large training corpus, has to fight a large amount of ambiguity and needs a subsequent parsing step (also see @cite_1 for the use of explanation-based learning for this purpose).
@cite_1
1528941926
In this paper, we have proposed novel methods for robust parsing that integrate the flexibility of linguistically motivated lexical descriptions with the robustness of statistical techniques. Our thesis is that the computation of linguistic structure can be localized if lexical items are associated with rich descriptions (supertags) that impose complex constraints in a local context. The supertags are designed such that only those elements on which the lexical item imposes constraints appear within a given supertag. Further, each lexical item is associated with as many supertags as the number of different syntactic contexts in which the lexical item can appear. This makes the number of different descriptions for each lexical item much larger than when the descriptions are less complex, thus increasing the local ambiguity for a parser. But this local ambiguity can be resolved by using statistical distributions of supertag co-occurrences collected from a corpus of parses. We have explored these ideas in the context of the Lexicalized Tree-Adjoining Grammar (LTAG) framework. The supertags in LTAG combine both phrase structure information and dependency information in a single representation. Supertag disambiguation results in a representation that is effectively a parse (an almost parse), and the parser need "only" combine the individual supertags. This method of parsing can also be used to parse sentence fragments such as in spoken utterances where the disambiguated supertag sequence may not combine into a single structure.