Abstract:

Accurately parsing natural language sentences requires large scale and detailed lexical grammars. We will see that for the problem of parsing natural language sentences, finite-state models are not an efficient but somewhat inaccurate tool but rather one of the best formalism to represent accurately complex linguistic phenomena. Finite-state transducers should appeal to the linguist looking for precise and natural description of complex syntactic structures while the wide range of formal operations on finite-state transducers provides the designer of parsing programs with powerful tools to improve parsing efficiency. The parsing programs derived from this approach are both simple, precise linguistically and very efficient.