TY - GEN

T1 - Zipper-driven Parsing for LFG Grammars

AU - Kaplan, Ronald M.

AU - Wedekind, Jürgen

PY - 2020

Y1 - 2020

N2 - We describe an approach to LFG parsing that is optimized for c-structure discontinuities that are established through "zipper" unification. These are characterized by parallel c-structure paths that carry the same function assignments. Wedekind and Kaplan (2020) demonstrated that LFG grammars giving rise to discontinuities with finitely bounded zipper paths can express only mildly context-sensitive dependencies and thus can be converted to equivalent linear context-free rewriting systems (LCFRSs). In principle, parsing with LCFRS grammars can be accomplished in polynomial time, but that may not be the most effective way of parsing with mildly context-sensitive dependencies. In this paper we propose a hybrid strategy for LFG parsing that is tuned to the common case of bounded zippers but still allows for putatively rare constructions that do not conform to the formal restrictions that guarantee finite boundedness. This strategy automatically takes advantage of mildly context-sensitive dependencies in addition to the context-free dependencies that the XLE parsing system has focused on (Maxwell and Kaplan 1996).

AB - We describe an approach to LFG parsing that is optimized for c-structure discontinuities that are established through "zipper" unification. These are characterized by parallel c-structure paths that carry the same function assignments. Wedekind and Kaplan (2020) demonstrated that LFG grammars giving rise to discontinuities with finitely bounded zipper paths can express only mildly context-sensitive dependencies and thus can be converted to equivalent linear context-free rewriting systems (LCFRSs). In principle, parsing with LCFRS grammars can be accomplished in polynomial time, but that may not be the most effective way of parsing with mildly context-sensitive dependencies. In this paper we propose a hybrid strategy for LFG parsing that is tuned to the common case of bounded zippers but still allows for putatively rare constructions that do not conform to the formal restrictions that guarantee finite boundedness. This strategy automatically takes advantage of mildly context-sensitive dependencies in addition to the context-free dependencies that the XLE parsing system has focused on (Maxwell and Kaplan 1996).

M3 - Conference article

VL - 20

SP - 169

EP - 189

JO - Proceedings of the LFG-conference

JF - Proceedings of the LFG-conference

SN - 1098-6782

T2 - The 25th International LFG Conference

Y2 - 23 June 2020 through 26 June 2020

ER -