From mick@ee.su.oz.au Mon Jan 17 13:55:28 EST 1994 Article: 1078 of comp.ai.nat-lang Xref: glinda.oz.cs.cmu.edu comp.ai.nat-lang:1078 Newsgroups: comp.ai.nat-lang Path: honeydew.srv.cs.cmu.edu!fs7.ece.cmu.edu!europa.eng.gtefsd.com!uunet!munnari.oz.au!yoyo.aarnet.edu.au!news.adelaide.edu.au!basser.cs.su.oz.au!metro!ee.su.oz.au!mick From: mick@ee.su.oz.au (Michael O'Donnell) Subject: Re: Halliday Parser Message-ID: Sender: news@ucc.su.OZ.AU Nntp-Posting-Host: brutus.ee.su.oz.au Organization: School of Electrical Engineering, University of Sydney Date: Sun, 16 Jan 1994 08:05:43 GMT Lines: 111 > Can someone help me building a Halliday parser? > (Or has someone build one?) There have been several implementations of Systemic parsers, which I will outline shortly. Note however that none of these are much good for analysing real text (except for a small prepared corpus), largely because we haven't developed grammars with adequate coverage yet. The NIGEL grammar from the Penman project (ISI) is reasonably large, yet when we have applied it to a corpus, very few sentences parse without problems. I could make a point that grammars which try to recognise just nouns and verbs are easy to write (while the systemic goal is to recover three layers of semantic information), but I will refrain. The NIGEL grammar is an approximation of Halliday's /Introduction to Functional Grammar/, mainly developed by Christian Matthiessen and others from ISI. There have been two attempts at parsing with it: 1) Bob Kasper: Converts the NIGEL grammar into a unification formalism (PATR) and uses PATR to parse. Very slow, and only worked on a handful of sentences. 2) Mick O'Donnell (me): parse a pruned version of the NIGEL grammar directly, and use all sorts of tricks to get the analyses done in realistic time. Still slow, and limited in the sentences it handles. Not really usable if you want a short-cut to anlysing huge amounts of text. Distribution of a mini-grammar parsing/generationsystem is expected when I finish my PHD which is soon. Two parsers have been written to handle Robin Fawcett's GENESYS grammar, which differs from Halliday's in various ways: Tim O'Donoghue, and Ruvan Weerasinghe. Below is a bibliography of work in Systemic Parsing: Bateman John, Emele Martin and Momma Stefan, 1992 "The nondirectional representation of Systemic Functional Grammars and Semantics as Typed Feature Structures" in Proceedings of COLING-92, Volume III, Nantes, France, pp916-920. Cummings Michael and Regina Al. 1985 "A PROLOG parser-generator for Systemic analysis of Old English Nominal Groups", in Benson, J. & Greaves, W. (eds.). 1985 Systemic Perspectives on Discourse, Volume 1. Norwood: Ablex. Kasper, Robert 1986 Systemic Grammar and Functional Unification Grammar In Benson, J. and Greaves, W., Selected Papers from the 12th International Systemics Workshop. Ablex, Norwood, N.J., USA. Kasper, Robert 1987a Feature Structures: A logical Theory with Application to Language Analysis. PH.D. dissertation, University of Michigan Kasper, Robert 1987b "A Unification Method for Disjunctive Feature Descriptions" in Proceedings of the 25th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, held July 6-9, 1987 Stanford, California. Kasper, Robert 1988a "An Experimental Parser for Systemic Grammars", Proceedings of the 12th Int. Conf. on Computational Linguistics, Budapest, Association for Computational Linguistics. Kasper, Robert 1988b "Parsing with Systemic Grammar", Mimeo. Kasper, Robert 1989 "Unification and Classification: An Experiment in Information-Based Parsing" In Proceedings of the International Workshop on Parsing Technologies, pages 1- 7, CMU, Pittsburgh. Kasper, Robert 1990 "Performing Integrated Syntactic and Semantic Parsing Using Classification" paper presented at Darpa Workshop on Speech and NL Processing, Pittsburgh, June 1990. McCord, Michael C. 1977 "Procedural Systemic Grammars" in Int. J. Man-Machine Studies, 9, pp255-286. Academic Press, London. Mellish, C. S. 1988 "Implementing Systemic Classification by Unification", Computational Linguistics, Vol. 14, Number 1, Winter 1988. O'Donnell, Michael 1993 "Reducing Complexity in a Systemic Parser" in Proceedings of the Third International Workshop on Parsing Technologies", Tilburg, the Netherlands, August 10-13. O'Donnell, Michael 1991 "EDA Reference Guide: Computational Processes I:Parser" Project report to Fujitsu (japan) - a good description of my parser - can send on request. O'Donoghue, Tim F. 1991a "The Vertical Strip Parser: A lazy approach to parsing" Research Report 91.15, School of Computer Studies, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK. O'Donoghue, Tim F. 1991b "A Semantic Interpreter for Systemic Grammars" in Proceedings of the ACL Workshop on Reversible Grammars, University of California at Berkeley, June 1991. Weerasinghe A. Ruvan and Robin Fawcett "Probabilistic Incremental Parsing in Systemic Functional Grammar" in Proceedings of the Third International Workshop on Parsing Technologies", Tilburg, the Netherlands, August 10-13, 1993. Winograd, Terry 1972 Understanding Natural Language. Academic Press. Mick O'Donnell University of Sydney Australia mick@ee.su.oz.au