LHIP: Interpreting Extended DCGs for Applied Grammar Development

This paper describes LHIP (Left-Head corner Island Parser), a parser designed for broadcoverage handling of unrestricted text. The system interprets an extended DCG formalism to produce a robust analyser that nds parses of the input made from \islands" of terminals (corresponding to terminals consumed by successful grammar rules). It is currently in use for processing dialogue transcripts from the HCRCMap Task Corpus (Anderson et al., 1991), although we expect its eventual applications to be much wider. 1 Transcribed natural speech contains a number of frequent characteristic `ungrammatical' phenomena: lled pauses, repetitions, restarts, etc. (as in e.g. Right I'll have : : :you know, like I'll have to : : : so I'm going between the picket fence and