Preliminary Analysis of a Breadth-First Parsing Algorithm: Theoretical and Experimental Results

Abstract

We will trace a brief history of context-free parsing algorithms and then describe some representation issues. The purpose of this paper is to share our philosophy and experience in adapting a well-known context-free parsing algorithm (Earley’s algorithm [9, 10] and variations thereof [29, 14, 27, 28]) to the parsing of a difficult and wide-ranging corpus of sentences. The sentences were gathered by Malhotra [23] in an experiment which fooled businessmen users into thinking they were interacting with a computer, when they were actually interacting with Malhotra in another room. The sentences are given in Appendix I. The MALHOTRA corpus is considerably more difficult than a second collection given in Appendix II (originally published in [16]). Section 4 compares empirical results obtained from these collections against theoretical predictions.

This research was supported (in part) by the National Institutes of Health Grant No.1 P01 LM 03374-02 from the National Library of Medicine, and by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DOD) monitored by the Office of Naval Research under Contract No. N00014-75-C-0661.