Newsgroups: comp.ai.nat-lang
Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!das-news2.harvard.edu!news2.near.net!news.mathworks.com!yeshua.marcam.com!uunet!seas.smu.edu!pedersen
From: pedersen@seas.smu.edu (Ted Pedersen)
Subject: parse unknown words
Message-ID: <1994Oct21.175206.5625@seas.smu.edu>
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Organization: SMU - School of Engineering & Applied Science - Dallas
Date: Fri, 21 Oct 1994 17:52:06 GMT
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I'd like to find an implementation (in Prolog especially) of a parser
that tries to parse sentences with unknown words. 

I'm especially interested in parsers that use a phrase structure
grammar and will attempt to parse sentences with unknown words as best
they can using modifications to fairly standard parsing algorithms
(Earley's, BUP, etc.)  

For instance suppose you are parsing:

1) The glark eats corn. 

and you have the following very simple grammar:

S -> NP VP
NP -> Det Noun
VP -> V Noun
Det -> the
Verb -> eats
Noun -> corn

glark is unknown. However, in order for 1) to be a sentence the parser
shold determine that glark must be a noun. 

I realize in more complicated sentences there may be multiple
possibile parts-of-speech for an unknown word. In fact, I'd like the
parser to report all of the possible parses of a sentence given a
word, or a number of words, are unknown.

I'd also be interested in any publications that describe such a
parser.  Any comments or thoughts would be appreciated. 

Regards
Ted

---
* Ted Pedersen                                  pedersen@seas.smu.edu * 
* Department of Computer Science and Engineering,                     *
* Southern Methodist University, Dallas, TX 75275      (214) 768-2126 *


