SYNTAGMA. A Linguistic Approach to Parsing
This work addresses parsing challenges in computational linguistics, but it is incremental as it builds on existing linguistic theories like Tesniere's syntax and Generative Grammar.
SYNTAGMA is a rule-based parsing system that tackles complex syntactic configurations and disambiguation in natural language processing by using a two-level structure with a language-independent parsing engine and language-specific grammars, achieving improved management of parsing engineering weak points.
SYNTAGMA is a rule-based parsing system, structured on two levels: a general parsing engine and a language specific grammar. The parsing engine is a language independent program, while grammar and language specific rules and resources are given as text files, consisting in a list of constituent structuresand a lexical database with word sense related features and constraints. Since its theoretical background is principally Tesniere's Elements de syntaxe, SYNTAGMA's grammar emphasizes the role of argument structure (valency) in constraint satisfaction, and allows also horizontal bounds, for instance treating coordination. Notions such as Pro, traces, empty categories are derived from Generative Grammar and some solutions are close to Government&Binding Theory, although they are the result of an autonomous research. These properties allow SYNTAGMA to manage complex syntactic configurations and well known weak points in parsing engineering. An important resource is the semantic network, which is used in disambiguation tasks. Parsing process follows a bottom-up, rule driven strategy. Its behavior can be controlled and fine-tuned.