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Parsing with Flexibility, Dynamic Strategies, and Idioms in Mind

Paper · 1989 · Oliviero Stock

Summary

The paper presents WEDNESDAY 2, a syntactic parser for Italian. Italian permits all six orderings of subject, verb and object and has rich morphology, so the space of possible analyses can grow quickly. The parser is designed to produce useful partial interpretations while a sentence is still being read, not only after it is finished. Most grammatical knowledge sits in the lexicon as compact feature structures. A chart algorithm works bottom-up and checks candidates against the left context. Unification is triggered once the head of a constituent has been analyzed, a policy the author calls the Principle of the Good Clerk. Idioms are handled by the same machinery as literal language: a separate idiomatic process starts only after a flexible idiom pattern passes an activation threshold. Because the parser runs as multiple processes, likelihood-based heuristics can choose which tasks to pursue. An interactive environment lets researchers try out such strategies, for example on sublanguages. The paper's main contribution is architectural rather than a quantitative evaluation. It demonstrates that one design can integrate incremental shallow semantics, word-order flexibility and idiom handling.

Key points

  • The system is WEDNESDAY 2, published in Computational Linguistics (1989). It targets Italian, where a single word such as rifacendogliene can bundle several morphemes, so morphological analysis is combined with syntax.
  • "Sleeping edges" in the chart make sure every necessary edge is eventually created without adding many unnecessary ones. Unification is order-independent and monotonic, but it is applied in steps rather than continuously.
  • Idiom recognition follows the literal analysis until a threshold is reached, after which an idiomatic process is added. This treats idioms as part of a continuum with ordinary language.
  • The heuristics for dynamic strategies are:
    • satisfy the verb's argument requirements ("impulses");
    • keep "viscosity," meaning a preference for the path already being followed;
    • choose the most likely edge among edges of similar length.
  • In the test sentence A Napoli preferisco Roma a Milano, the parser revises its analysis twice without re-parsing the object. This relies on a positional preference of .9 vs .1 for the verb preferisco. The interactive environment is compared to D-PATR and the LFG workbench.

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

 Institutions

🔬Istituto per la Ricerca Scientifica e TecnologicaTrento · Italy7 works · 2,488 citations

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 4The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Computer Science · 18,614 worksArtificial Intelligence · 17,965 worksArts and Humanities · 17,450 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 17,296 works

🧭 Topics 2Research subjects and languages the work is about.Morphology · 420 worksIdioms & multiword expressions · 222 works

Cite

Cite as Oliviero Stock. 1989. Parsing with Flexibility, Dynamic Strategies, and Idioms in Mind. Computational Linguistics.

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

@article{stock1989parsing,
  title = {{Parsing with Flexibility, Dynamic Strategies, and Idioms in Mind}},
  author = {Oliviero Stock},
  journal = {Computational Linguistics},
  year = {1989},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/J89-1001/}
}

References

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

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