Traditional and Computational Methods of Parsing in Human Languages
– Parsing involves breaking down a text into its component parts of speech.
– It requires studying conjugations and declensions in heavily inflected languages.
– Techniques like sentence diagrams are used to indicate the relation between elements in a sentence.
– Parsing was formerly central to the teaching of grammar.
– The teaching of parsing techniques is no longer common.
– Written texts in human languages can be parsed by computer programs.
– Human sentences are challenging to parse due to ambiguity in language structure.
– Formal rules are difficult to prepare for describing informal behavior.
– Researchers must agree on the grammar to be used for parsing.
– Most modern parsers rely on statistical approaches and training data.
Parsing Algorithms for Natural Language
– Parsing algorithms cannot rely on nice properties of the grammar.
– Context-free approximation to the grammar is often used for a first pass.
– CYK algorithm is commonly used with heuristics to save time.
– Some systems trade speed for accuracy using linear-time versions of the shift-reduce algorithm.
– Parse reranking is a recent development where the best option is selected from multiple analyses.
Semantic Parsing in Natural Language Understanding
– Semantic parsers convert text into a representation of its meaning.
– It involves evaluating the meaning of a sentence based on syntax and inferences.
– Parsing is a function of working memory in neurolinguistics.
– Parsing helps keep several parts of a sentence accessible for analysis.
– The function of sentence parsing is limited by the capacity of working memory.
Parsing Challenges in Psycholinguistics
– Parsing in psycholinguistics involves assigning words to categories and evaluating sentence meaning.
– Parsing is used to keep multiple parts of a sentence accessible in working memory.
– Garden-path sentences challenge parsing ability by appearing grammatically faulty at first.
– Syntactically complex sentences propose issues for mental parsing.
– Parsing in psycholinguistics is influenced by connotation and inferences from each word.
Discourse Analysis and Computer Languages
– Discourse analysis examines language use and semiotic events.
– It analyzes persuasive language, which is often referred to as rhetoric.
– A parser is a software component that builds a data structure from input data, often creating a parse tree or abstract syntax tree.
– Parsers can be preceded by a lexical analyzer, which creates tokens from input characters.
– Parsers can be programmed manually or generated automatically by a parser generator.
– Parsers are used in various domains, such as compilers, scanners, and input/output stages of a program.
– Regular expressions are commonly used for simple parsing tasks, allowing pattern matching and extraction of text.
Parsing, syntax analysis, or syntactic analysis is the process of analyzing a string of symbols, either in natural language, computer languages or data structures, conforming to the rules of a formal grammar. The term parsing comes from Latin pars (orationis), meaning part (of speech).
The term has slightly different meanings in different branches of linguistics and computer science. Traditional sentence parsing is often performed as a method of understanding the exact meaning of a sentence or word, sometimes with the aid of devices such as sentence diagrams. It usually emphasizes the importance of grammatical divisions such as subject and predicate.
Within computational linguistics the term is used to refer to the formal analysis by a computer of a sentence or other string of words into its constituents, resulting in a parse tree showing their syntactic relation to each other, which may also contain semantic information.[citation needed] Some parsing algorithms may generate a parse forest or list of parse trees for a syntactically ambiguous input.
The term is also used in psycholinguistics when describing language comprehension. In this context, parsing refers to the way that human beings analyze a sentence or phrase (in spoken language or text) "in terms of grammatical constituents, identifying the parts of speech, syntactic relations, etc." This term is especially common when discussing which linguistic cues help speakers interpret garden-path sentences.
Within computer science, the term is used in the analysis of computer languages, referring to the syntactic analysis of the input code into its component parts in order to facilitate the writing of compilers and interpreters. The term may also be used to describe a split or separation.