Incremental Construction of C- and F-Structure in a LFG-Parser

In this paper we present a parser for Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG) which is characterised by incrementally constructing the cand f-structure of a sentence during the parse. We then discuss the possibilities of the earliest check on consistency, coherence and completeness. Incremental construction of f-structure leads to an early detection and abort ion of incorrect paths and so increases parsing efficiency. Furthermore those semantic interpretat ion processes that operate on partial structures can be tr iggered at an earlier state. This also leads to a considerable improvement in parsing time. LFG seems to be well suited for such an approach because it provides for locality principles by the def in i t ion of coherence and completeness.