🧑‍🔬 Tracy Holloway King

Tracy Holloway King works in computational linguistics on large, hand-built grammars of natural language and on making them practical for real text and for many languages. The papers here centre on Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG) and the XLE constraint-based parser. They pair detailed linguistic analysis with statistical methods for choosing among competing parses, and they belong to the area of Syntax & grammar formalisms.

The most cited work, Parsing the Wall Street Journal using a Lexical-Functional Grammar and Discriminative Estimation Techniques (2002), applies the ParGram English grammar to the Penn Wall Street Journal treebank. Rather than converting the treebank's shallow brackets into LFG, it uses them to narrow the grammar's candidate analyses, which then train a log-linear disambiguation model. It also keeps the parser useful on unruly input in two ways. When no complete analysis exists, it assembles the fewest well-formed fragments. When time or memory runs short, it limits the work spent on unfinished structures. The Parallel Grammar Project, from the same year, reports on coordinated LFG grammars developed at separate sites for six languages, among them Urdu, Japanese, Norwegian and German as well as English and French. These grammars keep language-specific tree structures but agree on a shared functional layer. The project compares feature inventories across languages and tries out new analyses in one grammar before the others adopt them.

Both papers here date from 2002, so the most recent work listed continues this same line of multilingual grammar engineering and statistical parsing. King is currently at Adobe Systems. Earlier bylines include the Palo Alto Research Center from 1998 to 2012, as well as Microsoft and eBay. Co-authors on these papers include Stefan Riezler, Miriam Butt, Ronald M. Kaplan, Mark Johnson and Helge Dyvik.

Tracy Holloway King has 2 papers in our library, in 2002, most of them on Syntax & grammar formalisms; often with Helge Dyvik, Mark Johnson, Miriam Butt.