Analysis of Conjunctions in Rule Based Parser

Abstract

The aim of the present paper is to show how a rule-based parser for the Italian language has been extended to analyze sentences involving conjunctions. The most noticeable fact is the ease with which the required modifications fit in the previous parser structure. In particular, the rules written for analyzing simple sentences (without conjunctions) needed only small changes. On the contrary, more substantial changes were made to the exception-handling rules (called "natural changes") that are used to restructure the tree in case of failure of a syntactic hypothesis. T0 parser described in the present work constitutes the syntactic component of the FIDO system (a Flexible Interface for Database Operations), an interface allowing an end-user to access a relational database in natural language (Italian).