Parsing English with a Link Grammar
Abstract
We develop a formal grammatical system called a link grammar,
show how English grammar can be encoded in such a system, and give
algorithms for efficiently parsing with a link grammar. Although the
expressive power of link grammars is equivalent to that of context
free grammars, encoding natural language grammars appears to be much
easier with the new system. We have written a program for general
link parsing and written a link grammar for the English language. The
performance of this preliminary system -- both in the breadth of
English phenomena that it captures and in the computational resources
used -- indicates that the approach may have practical uses as well as
linguistic significance. Our program is written in C and may be
obtained through the internet.