Parsing Preferences and Linguistic Strategies

Abstract

We implemented in our parser four parsing strategies that obey LFG grammaticality conditions and follow the hypothesis that knowledge of language is used in a “modular“ fashion. The parsing strategies are the following: Minimal Attachment (MA), Functional Preference (FP), Semantic Evaluation (SE), Referential Individuation (RI). From the way in which we experimented with them in our implementation it appears that they are strongly interwoven. In particular, MA is dependent upon FP to satisfy argument/ function interpretation principles; with semantically biased sentences, MA, FP and SE apply in hierarchical order to license a phrase as argument or adjunct. RI is required and activated every time a singular definite NP has to be computed and is dependent upon the presence of a discourse model. The parser shows garden path effects and concurrently produces a processing breakdown which is linguistically motivated. Our parser is a DCG (Pereira & Warren, 1980) is implemented in Prolog and obeys a topdown depth-first deterministic parsing policy.