Combining statistical models with symbolic grammar in parsing

There are two streams of research in computational linguistics and natural language processing, the empiricist and rationalist traditions. Theories and computational techniques in these two streams have been developed separately and different in nature. Although the two traditions have been considered irreconcilable and have often been antagonistic toward each other, I have contention with this assertion, and thus claim that these two research streams in linguistics, despite or due to their differences, can be complementary to each other and should be combined into a unified methodology. I will demonstrate in my talk that there have been interesting developments in this direction of integration, and would like to discuss some of the recent results with their implications on engineering application.