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Parsing Ill-Formed Text Using an Error Grammar

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Abstract

This paper presents a robust parsing approach which is designed to address the issue of syntactic errors in text. The approach is based on the concept of an error grammar which is a grammar of ungrammatical sentences. An error grammar is derived from a conventional grammar on the basis of an analysis of a corpus of observed ill-formed sentences. A robust parsing algorithm is presented which is applied after a conventional bottom–up parsing algorithm has failed. This algorithm combines a rule from the error grammar with rules from the normal grammar to arrive at a parse for an ungrammatical sentence. This algorithm is applied to 50 test sentences, with encouraging results.

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Foster, J., Vogel, C. Parsing Ill-Formed Text Using an Error Grammar. Artificial Intelligence Review 21, 269–291 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1023/B:AIRE.0000036259.68818.1e

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/B:AIRE.0000036259.68818.1e

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