Backbone Extraction and Pruning for Speeding Up a Deep Parser for Dialogue Systems

Abstract

In this paper we discuss issues related to speeding up parsing with wide-coverage unification grammars. We demonstrate that state-of-the-art optimisation techniques based on backbone parsing before unification do not provide a general solution, because they depend on specific properties of the grammar formalism that do not hold for all unification based grammars. As an alternative, we describe an optimisation technique that combines ambiguity packing at the constituent structure level with pruning based on local features.