Basic Parsing with Context-Free Grammars

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• Basic Parsing with Context-Free Grammars

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Analyzing Linguistic Units

• Morphological parsing
• analyze words into morphemes and affixes
• rule-based, FSAs, FSTs
• Ngrams for Language Modeling
• POS Tagging
• Syntactic parsing
• identify constituents and their relationships
• to see if a sentence is grammatical
• to assign an abstract representation of meaning

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Syntactic Parsing

• Declarative formalisms like CFGs define the legal
  strings of a language -- but dont specify how to
  recognize or assign structure to them
• Parsing algorithms specify how to recognize the
  strings of a language and assign each string one
  (or more) syntactic analyses
• Parsing useful for grammar checking, semantic
  analysis, MT, QA, information extraction, speech
  recognitionand almost every task in NLP

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Parsing as a Form of Search

• Searching FSAs
• Finding the right path through the automaton
• Search space defined by structure of FSA
• Searching CFGs
• Finding the right parse tree among all possible
  parse trees
• Search space defined by the grammar
• Constraints provided by the input sentence and
  the automaton or grammar

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CFG for Fragment of English
S ? NP VP VP ? V
S ? Aux NP VP PP -gt Prep NP
S ? VP N ? book flight meal money
NP ? Det Nom V ? book include prefer
NP ?PropN Aux ? does
Nom ? N Nom Prep ?from to on
Nom ? N PropN ? Houston TWA
Nom ? Nom PP Det ? that this a
VP ? V NP
LCs
TopD BotUp
E.g.
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S VP NP Nom V Det
N Book that flight
Parse Tree for Book that flight for Prior CFG
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Rule Expansion
Det ? that this a
LCs
TopD BotUp
E.g.
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Top-Down Parser

• Builds from the root S node to the leaves
• Assuming we build all trees in parallel
• Find all trees with root S (or all rules w/lhs S)
• Next expand all constituents in these trees/rules
• Continue until leaves are pos
• Candidate trees failing to match pos of input
  string are rejected (e.g. Book that flight
  matches only one subtree)

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Top-Down Search Space for CFG (expanding only
leftmost leaves)
S S S NP VP Aux NP VP VP S
S S S S S NP VP NP VP Aux NP
VP Aux NP VP VP VP Det Nom PropN Det
Nom PropN V NP V Det
Nom N
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Bottom-Up Parsing

• Parser begins with words of input and builds up
  trees, applying grammar rules whose rhs match
• Book that flight
• N Det N V Det N
• Book that flight Book that flight
• Book ambiguous (2 pos appear in grammar)
• Parse continues until an S root node reached or
  no further node expansion possible

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Two Candidates One Successful Parse

• S
• VP
• VP NP NP
• Nom Nom
• V Det N V Det N
• Book that flight Book that flight

S ? VP NP
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Whats right/wrong with.

• Top-Down parsers they never explore illegal
  parses (e.g. which cant form an S) -- but waste
  time on trees that can never match the input
• Bottom-Up parsers they never explore trees
  inconsistent with input -- but waste time
  exploring illegal parses (with no S root)
• For both find a control strategy -- how explore
  search space efficiently?
• Pursuing all parses in parallel or backtrack or
  ?
• Which rule to apply next?
• Which node to expand next?

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A Possible Top-Down Parsing Strategy

• Depth-first search
• Agenda of search states expand search space
  incrementally, exploring most recently generated
  state (tree) each time
• When you reach a state (tree) inconsistent with
  input, backtrack to most recent unexplored state
  (tree)
• Which node to expand?
• Leftmost or rightmost
• Which grammar rule to use?
• Order in the grammar? How?

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Top-Down, Depth-First, Left-Right Strategy

• Initialize agenda with S tree and ptr to first
  word and make this current search state (cur)
• Loop until successful parse or empty agenda
• Apply all applicable grammar rules to leftmost
  unexpanded node of cur
• If this node is a POS category and matches that
  of the current input, push this onto agenda
• O.w. push new trees onto agenda
• Pop new cur from agenda
• Does this flight include a meal?

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Fig 10.7
CFG
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Left Corners Top-Down Parsing with Bottom-Up
Filtering

• We saw Top-Down, depth-first, L2R parsing
• Expands non-terminals along the trees left edge
  down to leftmost leaf of tree
• Moves on to expand down to next leftmost leaf
• Note In successful parse, current input word
  will be first word in derivation of node the
  parser currently processing
• So.look ahead to left-corner of the tree
• B is a left-corner of A if A gt B
• Build table with left-corners of all
  non-terminals in grammar and consult before
  applying rule

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Left Corners
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Left-Corner Table for CFG
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Left Recursion vs. Right Recursion

• Depth-first search will never terminate if
  grammar is left recursive (e.g. NP --gt NP PP)

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• Solutions
• Rewrite the grammar (automatically?) to a weakly
  equivalent one which is not left-recursive
• e.g. The man on the hill with the telescope
• NP ? NP PP (wanted Nom plus a sequence of PPs)
• NP ? Nom PP
• NP ? Nom
• Nom ? Det N
• becomes
• NP ? Nom NP
• Nom ? Det N
• NP ? PP NP (wanted a sequence of PPs)
• NP ? e
• Not so obvious what these rules mean

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• Harder to detect and eliminate non-immediate left
  recursion
• NP --gt Nom PP
• Nom --gt NP
• Fix depth of search explicitly
• Rule ordering non-recursive rules first
• NP --gt Det Nom
• NP --gt NP PP

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The city hall parking lot in town

• NP? NP NP PP
• NP ? Det Nom
• NP ? Adj Nom
• NP ? Nom Nom
• Nom ? NP Nom
• Nom ? N
• PP ? Prep NP
• N ? city hall lot town
• Adj ? parking
• Prep ? to for in

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Structural ambiguity

• Multiple legal structures
• Attachment (e.g. I saw a man on a hill with a
  telescope)
• Coordination (e.g. younger cats and dogs)
• NP bracketing (e.g. Spanish language teachers)

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NP vs. VP Attachment
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• Solution?
• Return all possible parses and disambiguate using
  other methods

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Summing Up

• Parsing is a search problem which may be
  implemented with many control strategies
• Top-Down or Bottom-Up approaches each have
  problems
• Combining the two solves some but not all issues
• Left recursion
• Syntactic ambiguity
• Next time Making use of statistical information
  about syntactic constituents
• Read Ch 11