Skip to main content

Let’s Parsetalk — Message-Passing Protocols for Object-Oriented Parsing

  • Chapter
Advances in Probabilistic and Other Parsing Technologies

Part of the book series: Text, Speech and Language Technology ((TLTB,volume 16))

Abstract

As a response to the requirements imposed by real-world natural language processing, we argue for a design of natural language grammars and their associated parsers in which declarative knowledge about language structure and procedural knowledge about language use are equally balanced within a strictly object-oriented specification and implementation framework. In particular, we introduce fundamental message-passing protocols for object-oriented parsing, which include, besides the one for basic dependency parsing, protocols for ambiguity handling, robustness, backtracking, preferential and predictive parsing, as well as textual reference resolution. Based on an empirical evaluation, we also provide reasons for sacrificing completeness of the parse in favor of efficiency gains.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 84.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 109.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book
USD 109.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

References

  • Agha, G. (1990). The structure and semantics of actor language. In J. W. de Bakker, W.-P. de Roever & G. Rozenberg (Eds.), Foundations of Object-Oriented Languages, Vol. 489, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pp. 1–59. Berlin: Springer.

    Google Scholar 

  • Allen, J. F. (1993). Natural language, knowledge representation, and logical form. In M. Bates & R. M. Weischedel (Eds.), Challenges in Natural Language Processing, pp. 146–175. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Briot, J.-P. (1989). Actalk: a testbed for classifying and designing actor languages in the Smalltalk-80 environment. In ECOOP’89Proceedings of the European Workshop on Object-Based Concurrent Computing, pp. 109–129. Nottingham, U.K., July 10–14, 1989. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bröker, N. (1998). Separating surface order and syntactic relations in a dependency grammar. In COLING/ACL’98-Proceedings of the 36th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics & 17th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Vol. 1, pp. 174–180. Montreal, Canada, August 10–14, 1998. San Francisco, CA: Morgan Kaufmann.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bröker, N. (1999). Eine Dependenzgrammatik zur Kopplung heterogener Wissensquellen, Vol. 405. Linguistische Arbeiten. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag. (Dissertation, Philosophy Department, Universität Freiburg, 1997).

    Google Scholar 

  • Charniak, E. (1997). Statistical parsing with a context-free grammar and word statistics. In AAAI’97/IAAI’97 — Proceedings of the 14th National Conference on Artificial Intelligence & 9th Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence Conference, pp. 598–603. Providence, Rhode Island, U.S.A., July 27–31, 1997. Menlo Park, CA & Cambridge, MA: AAAI Press & MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Chomsky, N. (1965). Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Church, K. W. (1980). On parsing strategies and closure. In Proceedings of the 18th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and Parasession on Topics in Interactive Discourse, pp. 107–111. Philadelphia, PA, June 19–22, 1980.

    Google Scholar 

  • Collins, M. (1997). Three generative, lexicalised models for statistical parsing. In Proceedings of the 35th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics & 8th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 16–23. Madrid, Spain, July 7–12, 1997. San Francisco, CA: Morgan Kaufmann.

    Google Scholar 

  • DeJong, G. F. (1979). Skimming Stories in Real Time: An Experiment in Integrated Understanding, (Ph.D. thesis). Department of Computer Science, Yale University. Research Report 158.

    Google Scholar 

  • Earley, J. (1970). An efficient context-free parsing algorithm. Communications of the ACM, 13(2):94–102.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Frazier, L. (1987). Theories of sentence processing. In L. Garfield (Ed.), Modularity in Knowledge Representation and Natural-Language Understanding, pp. 291–307. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Grosz, B. J., A. K. Joshi & S. Weinstein (1995). Centering: a framework for modeling the local coherence of discourse. Computational Linguistics, 21(2):203–225.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hahn, U. & G. Adriaens (1994). Parallel natural language processing: background and overview. In G. Adriaens & U. Hahn (Eds.), Parallel Natural Language Processing, pp. 1–134. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hahn, U., K. Markert & M. Strube (1996). A conceptual reasoning approach to textual ellipsis. In W. Wahlster (Ed.), ECAI’96Proceedings of the 12th European Conference on Artifical Intelligence, pp. 572–576. Budapest, Hungary, August 11–16, 1996. Chichester: John Wiley.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hahn, U. & M. Romacker (2000). Content Management in SynDiKate: How Technical Documents Are Automatically Transformed to Text Knowledge Bases. Data & Knowledge Engineering.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hahn, U., M. Romacker & S. Schulz (1999). Discourse structures in medical reports — Watch out! The generation of referentially coherent and valid text knowledge bases in the medSynDiKate system. International Journal of Medical Informatics, 53(1): 1–28.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hahn, U., S. Schacht & N. Bröker (1994). Concurrent, object-oriented natural language parsing: the ParseTalk model. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 41(1/2): 179–222.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hahn, U. & K. Schnattinger (1998). Towards text knowledge engineering. In AAAI’98/IAAI’98Proceedings of the 15th National Conference on Artificial Intelligence & 10th Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence, pp. 524–531. Madison, Wisconsin, July 26–30, 1998. Menlo Park, CA & Cambridge, MA: AAAI Press & MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hawkins, J. A. (1994). A Performance Theory of Order and Constituency, Vol. 73. Cambridge Studies in Linguistics. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Heinsohn, J., D. Kudenko, B. Nebel & H.-J. Profitlich (1994). An empirical analysis of terminological representation systems. Artificial Intelligence, 68(2):367–397.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hobbs, J. R. & J. Bear (1990). Two principles of parse preference. In COLING ‘90Papers Presented at the 13th International Conference on Computational Linguistics on the Occasion of the 25th Anniversary of COLING & the 350th Anniversary of Helsinki University, Vol. 3, pp. 162–167. Helsinki, Finland, 1990.

    Google Scholar 

  • Huyck, C. R. & S. L. Lytinen (1993). Efficient heuristic natural language parsing. In AAAV93Proceedings of the 11th National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, pp. 386–391. Washington, D.C., July 11–15, 1993. Menlo Park, CA & Cambridge, MA: AAAI Press & MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Jackendoff, R. (1990). Semantic Structures. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Jacobs, P. S. (1990). To parse or not to parse: relation-driven text skimming. In COLING’90Papers Presented at the 13th International Conference on Computational Linguistics on the Occasion of the 25th Anniversary of COLIN G & the 350th Anniversary of Helsinki University, Vol. 2, pp. 194–198. Helsinki, Finland, 1990.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kahane, S., A. Nasr & O. Rambow (1998). Pseudo-projectivity: apolynomially parsable non-projective dependency grammar. In COLING/ACL’98 — Proceedings of the 36th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics & 17th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Vol. 1, pp. 646–652. Montreal, Canada, August 10–14, 1998. San Francisco, CA: Morgan Kaufmann.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kaplan, R. M. (1987). Three seductions of computational psycholinguistics. In P. Whitelock, M. Wood, H. Somers, R. Johnson & P. Bennett (Eds.), Linguistic Theory and Computer Applications, pp. 149–188. London: Academic Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kay, M. (1982). Algorithm schemata and data structures in syntactic processing. In S. Allen (Ed.), Text Processing. Text Analysis and Generation. Text Typology and Attribution. Proceedings of the “Nobel Symposium 51” , Vol. 16, Data Linguistica, pp. 327–358. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lavie, A. & M. Tomita (1996). GLR*: an efficient noise-skipping parsing algorithm for context-free grammars. In H. Bunt & M. Tomita (Eds.), Recent Advances in Parsing Technology, Vol. 1, Text, Speech and Language Technology. Dordrecht, Boston: Kluwer.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lombardo, V. & L. Lesmo (1998). Formal aspects and parsing issues of dependency theory. In COLING/ACL’98Proceedings of the 36th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics & 17th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Vol. 2, pp. 787–793. Montreal, Canada, August 10–14, 1998. San Francisco, CA: Morgan Kaufmann.

    Google Scholar 

  • MacGregor, R. & R. Bates (1987). The LOOM Knowledge Representation Language. Technical Report RS-87–188: Information Sciences Institute, University of Southern California.

    Google Scholar 

  • Marcus, M. (1980). A Theory of Syntactic Recognition for Natural Language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Markert, K. & U. Hahn (1997). On the interaction of metonymies and anaphora. In IJCAI’97 — Proceedings of the 15th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Vol. 2, pp. 1010–1015. Nagoya, Japan, August 23–29, 1997. San Francisco, CA: Morgan Kaufmann.

    Google Scholar 

  • Mellish, C. S. (1989). Some chart-based techniques for parsing ill-formed input. In Proceedings of the 27th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 102–109. Vancouver, B.C., Canada, 26–29 June 1989.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Menzel, W. (1994). Parsing of spoken language under time constraints. In A. Cohn (Ed.), ECAI’94 — Proceedings of the 11th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence, pp. 560–564. Amsterdam, The Netherlands, August 8–12 1994. Chichester: John Wiley.

    Google Scholar 

  • Neuhaus, P. (1999). Nebenläufiges Parsing: Ein lexikalisch verteiltes Verfahren zur performanzgrammatischen Analyse beim Textverstehen, Vol. 194. DISKI. St. Augustin: infix. (Dissertation, Department for Applied Sciences, Universität Freiburg, 1997).

    Google Scholar 

  • Neuhaus, P. & N. Bröker (1997). The complexity of recognition of linguistically adequate dependency grammars. In Proceedings of the 35th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics & 8th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 337–343. Madrid, Spain, 7–12 July 1997. San Francisco, CA: Morgan Kaufmann.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Neuhaus, P. & U. Hahn (1996). Restricted parallelism in object-oriented lexical parsing. In COLING’96Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Vol. 1, pp. 502–507. Copenhagen, Denmark, August 5–9, 1996.

    Google Scholar 

  • Robinson, J. J. (1975). Performance grammars. In D. R. Reddy (Ed.), Speech Recognition. Invited Papers Presented at the 1974 IEEE Symposium, pp. 401–427. New York: Academic Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Romacker, M., K. Markert & U. Hahn (1999). Lean semantic interpretation. In IJCAI’99Proceedings of the 16th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Vol. 2, pp. 868–875. Stockholm, Sweden, July 31 -August 6, 1999. San Francisco, CA: Morgan Kaufmann.

    Google Scholar 

  • Schacht, S. & U. Hahn (1997). Temporal reasoning about actor programs. In E. Costa & A. Cardoso (Eds.), Progress in Artificial Intelligence. EPIA’97 — Proceedings of the 8th Portuguese Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Vol. 1323, Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence, pp. 279–290. Coimbra, Portugal, October 6–9, 1997. Berlin: Springer.

    Google Scholar 

  • Schulz, S., M. Romacker, G. Faggioli & U. Hahn (1999). From knowledge import to knowledge finishing: automatic acquisition and semi-automatic refinement of medical knowledge. In B. Gaines, R. Kremer & M. Musen (Eds.), KAW’99Proceedings of the 12th Workshop on Knowledge Acquisition, Modeling and Management, pp. 7–8–1–7–8–12. Banff, Alberta, Canada, October 16–21, 1999.

    Google Scholar 

  • Shieber, S. M. (1986). An Introduction to Unification-based Approaches to Grammar, Vol. 4. CSLI Lecture Notes. Stanford, CA: Stanford University, Center for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI).

    Google Scholar 

  • Strube, M. & U. Hahn (1995). ParseTalk about sentence- and text-level anaphora. In EACL’95 — Proceedings of the 7th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 237–244. Dublin, Ireland, March 27–31, 1995.

    Google Scholar 

  • Strube, M. & U. Hahn (1999). Functional centering: Grounding referential coherence in information structure. Computational Linguistics, 25(3):309–344.

    Google Scholar 

  • Thibadeau, R., M. A. Just & P. A. Carpenter (1982). A model of the time course and content of reading. Cognitive Science, 6:157–203.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Uszkoreit, H. (1991). Strategies for adding control information to declarative grammars. In Proceedings of the 29th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics. Berkeley, Cal., USA, 18–21 June 1991.

    Google Scholar 

  • Winograd, T. (1983). Language as a Cognitive Process, Vol. 1, Syntax. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.

    Google Scholar 

  • Woods, W. A. & J. G. Schmolze (1992). The Kl-One family. Computers & Mathematics with Applications, 23(2/5): 133–177.

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2000 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht

About this chapter

Cite this chapter

Hahn, U., Bröker, N., Neuhaus, P. (2000). Let’s Parsetalk — Message-Passing Protocols for Object-Oriented Parsing. In: Bunt, H., Nijholt, A. (eds) Advances in Probabilistic and Other Parsing Technologies. Text, Speech and Language Technology, vol 16. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9470-7_10

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9470-7_10

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht

  • Print ISBN: 978-90-481-5579-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-94-015-9470-7

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

Publish with us

Policies and ethics