Theoretical Syntax and Practical Parsing

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• Stephen Clark, University of Cambridge, Computer Laboratory
• Tuesday 26 May 2009, 16:00-17:30
• GR-06/07, English Faculty Building.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Susan Rolfe.

In this talk I will describe a state-of-the-art parser of natural language which uses a grammatical formalism from the theoretical linguistics literature: Combinatory Categorial Grammar (CCG). CCG was designed to capture unbounded dependencies in text, such as those arising from coordination and extraction phenomena.

I will describe a recent evaluation which measures how well the CCG parser – and other off-the-shelf parsers – are able to recover such dependencies. I will also show that the use of CCG leads to a surprisingly robust and efficient parser. The parser is able to analyse sentences of naturally occurring text – from newspapers and biomedical research papers, for example – at speeds of tens of sentences per second. This allows practical generation of sophisticated linguistic representations on a very large scale.

This talk is part of the RCEAL Tuesday Colloquia series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• All Talks (aka the CURE list)
• GR-06/07, English Faculty Building
• RCEAL Tuesday Colloquia

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