Parsing English with a Link Grammar

We develop a formal grammatical system called a link grammar, show how English grammar can be encoded in such a system, and give algorithms for efficiently parsing with a link grammar. Although the expressive power of link grammars is equivalent to that of context free grammars, encoding natural language grammars appears to be much easier with the new system. We have written a program for general link parsing and written a link grammar for the English language. The performance of this preliminary system – both in the breadth of English phenomena that it captures and in the computational resources used – indicates that the approach may have practical uses as well as linguistic significance. Our program is written in C and may be obtained through the internet. c 1991 Daniel Sleator and Davy Temperley * School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, [email protected]. y Music Department, Columbia University, New York, NY 10027, [email protected]. Research supported in part by the National Science Foundation under grant CCR-8658139, Olin Corporation, and R. R. Donnelley and Sons. The views and conclusions contained in this document are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as representing the official policies, either expressed or implied, of Olin Corporation, R. R. Donnelley and Sons, or the NSF.