A Hybrid Strategy For Regular Grammar Parsing

The paper outlines a hybrid architecture for a partial parser based on regular grammars over XML documents. The parser is used to support the annotation process in the BulTreeBank project. Thus the parser annotates only the ‘sure’ cases. To maximize the number of the analyzed phrases the parser applies a set of grammars in a dynamic fashion. Each grammar determines not only the constituent structure (plus some syntactic dependencies internal to the structure), but also a description of the local and global context of the recognized phrase. The grammars available to the parser are arranged in a network. The order of the grammars application depends on the initial ordering in the network and the descriptions associated with the grammars. Thus the traverse is not deterministic. Additionally, the application of the grammars can be interleaved with the applications of other XML tools like remove, insert and transform operations. This architecture provides a flexible means for guiding the linguistic analysis in order to utilize all the available linguistic knowledge and to produce a very accurate partial analysis.