Week4-3Classic parsing methods

Parsing as search

• There are 2 types of constraints on the parses
  
  • from the input sentence
  • from the grammar
• Therefore 2 types of approaches to parsing
  
  • Top-down
  • Bottom-up

Shift-reduce parsing

• a bottom-up parser
  
  • tries to match the RHS of a production until it can build an S
• shift operation
  
  • each word in the input sentence is pushed onto a stack
• reduce operation
  
  • if the top n words on the top of the stack match the RHS of a production, then they are popped and replaced by the LHS of the production
• stopping condition
  
  • The process stops when the input sentence has been processed and S has been popped from the stack.

Dynamic programming(mainly CKY)

• Motivation
  
  • A lot of work is repeated
  • Caching intermediate results improves the complexity
• Dynamic programming
  
  • building a parse for a substring [i,j] based on all parses [i,k] and [k,j] that are included in it.
• Complexity
  
  • $O(n^3)$ for recognizing an input string of length n
• CKY
  
  • bottom-up
  • requires a normalized(binarized) grammar
• Early parser
  
  • top-down
  • more complicated

Complexity of CKY

• There are $O(n^2)$ cells in the table ($\frac{n(n+1)}{2}$)
• Single parse
  
  • Each cell requires a linear lookup
  • Total tim complexity is $O(n^3)$
• All parses
  
  • Total time complexity is exponential

Chomsky Normal form

• All rules have to be in binary form:
  
  • X -> Y Z or X -> w
• This introduces new non-terminals for
  
  • hybrid rules(mixture of terminal and non-terminal rules)
  • n-ary rules(more than 2 non terminals)
  • unary rules

Issues with CKY

• Weak equivalence only
  
  • Same language, different structure
  • If the grammar has to be converted to CNF, then the final parse tree doesn’t match the original grammar
  • However, it can be converted back using a specific procedure
• Syntactic ambiguity
  
  • (Deterministic) CKY has no way to perform syntactic disambiguation