Parsing with partially known grammar

Abstract

We address the problem of making syntactic sense of text for which the grammar has only partial information. Our proposed methodology is to adapt a recent formalism, Womb Grammars, into parsing creative text that departs from the grammar at hand, or which cannot rely on a complete grammar being available. We argue that unspecified information can be detected with appropriate ontologies together with our adaptation of a recently introduced constraint-based methodology for acquiring linguistic information on a given language from that of another. Our implementation tool is CHRG (Constraint Handling Rule Grammars). We examine as well possible extensions to multilingual text parsing. Our proposed methodology exploits the descriptive power of constraints both for defining sentence acceptability and for inferring lexical knowledge from a word’s sentential context, even when foreign.