Incremental finite-state parsing

Abstract

This paper describes a new finite-state shallow parser. It merges constructive and reductionist approaches within a highly modular architecture. Syntactic information is added at the sentence level in an incremental way, depending on the contextual information available at a given stage. This approach overcomes the inefficiency of previous fully reductionist constraint-based systems, while maintaining broad coverage and linguistic granularity. The implementation relies on a sequence of networks built with the replace operator. Given the high level of modularity, the core grammar is easily augmented with corpus-specific sub-grammars. The current system is implemented for French and is being expanded to new languages.