abbreviation(s): NL Parsing

definition: Parsing (from Latin "pars orationis" = parts of speech) is the syntactic analysis of languages. Natural Language Parsing is the syntactic analysis of natural languages, such as Finnish or Chinese. The objective of Natural Language Parsing is to determine parts of sentences (such as verbs, noun phrases, or relative clauses), and the relationships between them (such as subject or object). Unlike parsing of formally defined artificial languages (such as Java or predicate logic), parsing of natural languages presents problems due to ambiguity, and the productive and creative use of language.

See also the corresponding HLT Survey chapter: http://www.lt-world.org/hlt_survey/ltw-chapter3-6.pdf

related organisation(s):

• Palo Alto Research Center (PARC)
• Language Technology Lab (LT Lab)
• Center for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI)
• Natural Language Theory and Technology (NLTT)
• Tsujii Laboratory

related person(s):

• Masaru Tomita
• John A. Carroll
• Mark-Jan Nederhof
• Bob Carpenter
• Giorgio Satta
• Martin Kay
• Oliviero Stock
• Jay Earley
• Ronald M. Kaplan
• Bernd Kiefer

relevant source(s):

• SIGPARSE (ACL special interest group)

related publication(s):

Parsing Techniques - A Practical Guide.
Dick Grune and Ceriel J.H. Jacobs.
Ellis Horwood. Chichester, England.1990.
http://www.cs.vu.nl/~dick/PTAPG.html

International Workshop on Parsing Technologies.

Introduction to Automata Theory, Languages, and Computation.
J. E. Hopcroft and J. D. Ullman.
Addison Wesley. 1979.

Parsing as Deduction.
Pereira, F.C.N., Warren, D.H.D.
Proc. 21 st Annual Meeting of the ACL. 1983.

Efficient Parsing for Natural Language.
Masaru Tomita.
Kluwer Academic Publishers. Boston, MA. 1986.

An Efficient Context-free Parsing Algorithm.
Jay Earley.
Communications of the ACM. 13 (2). 1970. 94--102.

The Theory of Parsing, Translation and Compiling, Vol. I: Parsing.
A. V. Aho and J. D. Ullman.
Prentice-Hall. Englewood Cliffs, N.J. 1972.

An Efficient Probabilistic Context-Free Parsing Algorithm that Computes Prefix Probabilities.
A. Stolcke.
Computational Linguistics. 21 (2). 1995. 165--201.

Special Issue on Efficient processing with HPSG: Methods, systems, evaluation.
Flickinger, D., S. Oepen, H. Uszkoreit & J. Tsuji (Eds.).
Journal of Natural Language Engineering. 6 (1). 2000.