A comparison of rule-invocation strategies in context-free chart parsing

Abstract

Currently several grammatical formalisms converge towards being declarative and towards utilizing context-free phrase-structure grammar as a backbone, e.g. LFG and PATR-II. Typically the processing of these formalisms is organized within a chart-parsing framework. The declarative character of the formalisms makes it important to decide upon an overalloptimal control strategy on the part of the processor. In particular, this brings the rule-invocation strategy into criticalfocus: to gain maximal processing efficiency,one has to determine the best way of putting the rules to use. The aim of this paper isto provide a survey and a practicalcomparison of fundamental rule-invocation strategieswithin context-free chart parsing.