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Dynamic Strategy Selection in Flexible Parsing
journal contribution
posted on 2006-01-01, 00:00 authored by Jaime G. Carbonell, Philip J HayesRobust natural language interpretation requires strong semantic domain
models, "fail-soft" recovery heuristics, and very flexible control
structures. Although single-strategy parsers have met with a measure of
success, a multi.strategy approach is shown to provide a much higher
degree of flexibility, redundancy, and ability to bring task-specific domain
knowledge (in addition to general linguistic knowledge) to bear on both
grammatical and ungrammatical input. A parsing algorithm is presented
that integrates several different parsing strategies, with case-frame
instantiation dominating. Each of these parsing strategies exploits
different types of knowledge; and their combination provides a strong
framework in which to process conjunctions, fragmentary input, and
ungrammatical structures, as well as less exotic, grammatically correct
input. Several specific heuristics for handling ungrammatical input are
presented within this multi-strategy framework.