Abstract
Natural language support is a powerful feature that enhances user interaction with query systems. NLP requires dealing with ambiguities. Traditional probabilistic parsers provide a convenient means for disambiguation. However, they incorrigibly return wrong sequences of tokens, they impose hard constraints on the way lexical and syntactic ambiguities can be resolved, and they are limited in the mechanisms they allow for taking context into account. In comparison, model-based parser generators allow for flexible constraint specification and reference resolution, which facilitates the context consideration. In this paper, we explain how the ModelCC model-based parser generator supports statistical language models and arbitrary probability estimators. Then, we present the ModelCC implementation of a natural language parser based on the syntax of most Romance and Germanic languages. This natural language parser can be instantiated for a specific language by connecting it with a thesaurus (for lexical analysis), a linguistic corpus (for syntax-driven disambiguation), and an ontology or semantic database (for semantics-driven disambiguation).
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
20q, http://www.20q.net
Charniak, E.: Statistical parsing with a context-free grammar and word statistics. In: Proc. AAAI 1997, pp. 598–603 (1997)
Chomsky, N.: Remarks on nominalization. In: Jacobs, R., Rosenbaum, P. (eds.) Readings in English Transformational Grammar, pp. 184–221 (1970)
Collins, M.: Head-driven statistical models for natural language parsing. Computational Linguistics 29(4), 589–637 (2003)
Fodor, J.A.: The Language of Thought. Crowell Press (1975)
Fowler, M.: Using metadata. IEEE Software 19(6), 13–17 (2002)
Jurafsky, D., Martin, J.H.: Speech and Language Processing: An Introduction to Natural Language Processing, Computational Linguistics and Speech Recognition, 2nd edn. Prentice Hall (2009)
Kleppe, A.: Towards the generation of a text-based IDE from a language metamodel. In: Akehurst, D.H., Vogel, R., Paige, R.F. (eds.) ECMDA-FA. LNCS, vol. 4530, pp. 114–129. Springer, Heidelberg (2007)
Markov, A.A.: Dynamic Probabilistic Systems (Volume I: Markov Models). In: Howard, R. (ed.) Extension of the Limit Theorems of Probability Theory to a Sum of Variables Connected in a Chain, pp. 552–577. John Wiley & Sons (1971)
Nawrocki, J.R.: Conflict detection and resolution in a lexical analyzer generator. Information Processing Letters 38(6), 323–328 (1991)
Ney, H.: Dynamic programming parsing for context-free grammars in continuous speech recognition. IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing 39(2), 336–340 (1991)
Quesada, L.: A model-driven parser generator with reference resolution support. In: Proceedings of the 27th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering, pp. 394–397 (2012)
Quesada, L., Berzal, F., Cubero, J.-C.: A language specification tool for model-based parsing. In: Yin, H., Wang, W., Rayward-Smith, V. (eds.) IDEAL 2011. LNCS, vol. 6936, pp. 50–57. Springer, Heidelberg (2011)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Quesada, L., Berzal, F., Cubero, JC. (2013). A Model-Based Multilingual Natural Language Parser — Implementing Chomsky’s X-bar Theory in ModelCC. In: Larsen, H.L., Martin-Bautista, M.J., Vila, M.A., Andreasen, T., Christiansen, H. (eds) Flexible Query Answering Systems. FQAS 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8132. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-40769-7_26
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-40769-7_26
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-40768-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-40769-7
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)