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A Practical System for Human-Like Parsing

Christian R. Huyck

This paper describes a human-like natural language parser called Plink. It works by parsing left-to-right through a sentence and keeping a complete representation of the partially read sentence. It does this by combining a sophisticated unification-based grammar and grammar rule selection heuristics. Plink also functions in real world applications. To do this, it must process texts that are not grammatical and does this by combining a general grammar and taking advantage of preference levels in the rule selection heuristics. It has been evaluated on two parsing metrics: Parseval [Black et al. 1991] and a dependency based metric [Lin 1996]. Plink performs well but below the state of the art. Like humans, Plink parses in linear time, and generates one interpretation that is both syntactic and semantic. It is psycholinguistically inspired.

Keywords: Human Language Technology, Natural Language Processing, Cognitive Modelling

Citation: Christian R. Huyck: A Practical System for Human-Like Parsing. In W.Horn (ed.): ECAI2000, Proceedings of the 14th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IOS Press, Amsterdam, 2000, pp.436-440.


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ECAI-2000 is organised by the European Coordinating Committee for Artificial Intelligence (ECCAI) and hosted by the Humboldt University on behalf of Gesellschaft für Informatik.