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Slot Grammars

Paper · 1980 · Michael C. McCord

Summary

McCord proposes slot grammars, a formalism for natural language syntax with a LISP parser. It is built around grammatical relations (slots) and the rules that fill them. The parser reads a sentence left to right, working bottom-up. Each phrase grows middle-out from its head word and keeps a register of still-open slots, ASLOTS. The head's lexical entry partly determines the starting slots, so verb dependencies are encoded directly rather than through transitivity features or network states. Rules for a slot only run while that slot is still open, which avoids wasted rule attempts. A slot's attached procedure can raise slots from an embedded filler into the matrix phrase. This handles unbounded WH-movement without rules that search through chains of embedded clauses or conjunctions. The paper compares the design with Heidorn's APSG and Woods' ATN, links it to Hudson's daughter-dependency grammar, and illustrates it with a sample grammar and lexicon. It reports no quantitative evaluation. Its value is a clear blend of lexically driven and goal-driven parsing.

Key points

  • Core data structure: ASLOTS is treated as an unordered set of optional slots.
    • Filled slots are normally removed.
    • Slots marked as multiple, such as ADVL, can take several fillers.
    • Checks for obligatory slots must be written explicitly in the grammar.
  • How a VP's initial slots are set: default slots shared by all verbs (SUBJ, AUXL, ADVL) are merged with the verb's own sister-dependency (SD) list. For example, give contributes (IOBJ OBJ).
  • RAISE operation: the COMP slot copies the open slots of its filler VP upward. This lets which chair in Which chair does Mary believe that Al bought? fill the embedded OBJ.
    • A CLOSE flag, set at the state for fronted items ($7), blocks raising out of clauses that already have fronting.
    • The REL slot never calls RAISE.
  • Ambiguity example: the parser returns two analyses for When did Mary say John had left?, depending on which verb when attaches to.
  • Venue: published in the American Journal of Computational Linguistics (1980).

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 2The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Computer Science · 18,614 worksArtificial Intelligence · 17,965 works

Cite

Cite as Michael C. McCord. 1980. Slot Grammars. Computational Linguistics.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

@article{mccord1980slot,
  title = {{Slot Grammars}},
  author = {Michael C. McCord},
  journal = {Computational Linguistics},
  year = {1980},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/J80-1003/}
}

References

13 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

  1. Cook, W. A. (1969). Introduction to Tagmemic Analysis. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York. find
  2. Heidorn, G. E. (1972). Natural Language Inputs to a Simulation Programming System. Technical Report NPS-55HD72101A, Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, California. find
  3. Heidorn, G. E. (1975). Augmented phrase structure grammars. In Theoretical Issues in Natural Language Processing, B. L. Nash-Webber and R. C. S c h a n k (Eds.), pp. 2-5, Association for Computational Linguistics. find
  4. Hudson, R. A. (1971). English Complex Sentences. N o r t h - Holland, Amsterdam. find
  5. Hudson, R. A. (1976). Arguments for a Non-transformational Grammar. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. find
  6. Hudson, R. A. (1977). The power of morphological rules. Lingua, 42, 73-89. find
  7. Kac, M. B. (1978). Corepresentation of Grammatical Structure. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis. find
  8. McCord, M. C. (1975). On the form of a systemic g r a m m a r . Journal o f Linguistics, 11, 195-212. find
  9. McCord, M. C. (1977). Procedural systemic grammars. International Journal o f Man-Machine Studies, 9, 255-286. find
  10. Minsky, M. (1975). A framework for representing knowledge. In The Psychology o f Computer Vision, P. H. Winston (Ed.), pp. 211-277. McGraw-Hill, New York. find
  11. W i n o g r a d , T. (1975). Frame representations and the declarative/procedural controversy. In Representation and Understanding, D. G. B o b r o w a n d A. Collins (Eds.), pp. 185-210, Academic Press, New York. find
  12. Woods, W. A. (1970). Transition network grammars for natural language analysis. CACM, 13, 591-606. find
  13. Woods, W. A. (1973). A n experimental parsing system for transition networks. In Natural Language Processing, R. Rustin (Ed.), pp. 111-154, Algorithmics Press, New York. find

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