A deterministic syntactic-semantic parser
Gérard Sabah, Mohamed Y. Rady · International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence · 1983
We consider that we have made a decisive step towards determinism in parsing. We agree with Winograd's hesitation to evaluate determinism hypothesis as formulated by Marcus. However, this does not make us doubt about possibility of determinism; on contrary, we examined not only how to improve over Marcus, but also historical reasons of non-determinism of most systems. Our improvements are based on two principles: syntactic-semantic integration, and quasi-simultaneousness. The first means that there is no such thing as the autonomy of syntax (Marcus); so, we agree with Schank and, further, we showed that local semantic ambiguities could be solved deterministi - cally (Marcus (ch.10) claims that these ambiguities need parallel processing). The second permits processing of structures too difficult for PARSIFAL e.g. locally ambiguous PP attachments. Detailed examples support our proposals.