Fast Parsing using Pruning and Grammar Specialization

This paper describes Picky, a probabilistic agenda-based chart parsing algorithm which uses a technique called {\em probabilistic prediction} to predict which grammar rules are likely to lead to an acceptable parse of the input. Using a suboptimal search method, Picky significantly reduces the number of edges produced by CKY-like chart parsing algorithms, while maintaining the robustness of pure bottom-up parsers and the accuracy of existing probabilistic parsers. Experiments...

A significant amount of information in today's world is stored in structured and semi-structured knowledge bases. Efficient and simple methods to query them are essential and must not be restricted to only those who have expertise in formal query languages. The field of semantic parsing deals with converting natural language utterances to logical forms that can be easily executed on a knowledge base. In this survey, we examine the various components of a semantic parsing syst...

We revisit domain adaptation for parsers in the neural era. First we show that recent advances in word representations greatly diminish the need for domain adaptation when the target domain is syntactically similar to the source domain. As evidence, we train a parser on the Wall Street Jour- nal alone that achieves over 90% F1 on the Brown corpus. For more syntactically dis- tant domains, we provide a simple way to adapt a parser using only dozens of partial annotations. For ...

We argue that grammatical analysis is a viable alternative to concept spotting for processing spoken input in a practical spoken dialogue system. We discuss the structure of the grammar, and a model for robust parsing which combines linguistic sources of information and statistical sources of information. We discuss test results suggesting that grammatical processing allows fast and accurate processing of spoken input.

The paper presents an overview of the Spoken Language Translator (SLT) system's hybrid language-processing architecture, focussing on the way in which rule-based and statistical methods are combined to achieve robust and efficient performance within a linguistically motivated framework. In general, we argue that rules are desirable in order to encode domain-independent linguistic constraints and achieve high-quality grammatical output, while corpus-derived statistics are need...

While sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) models achieve state-of-the-art performance in many natural language processing tasks, they can be too slow for real-time applications. One performance bottleneck is predicting the most likely next token over a large vocabulary; methods to circumvent this bottleneck are a current research topic. We focus specifically on using seq2seq models for semantic parsing, where we observe that grammars often exist which specify valid formal represen...

For building question answering systems and natural language interfaces, semantic parsing has emerged as an important and powerful paradigm. Semantic parsers map natural language into logical forms, the classic representation for many important linguistic phenomena. The modern twist is that we are interested in learning semantic parsers from data, which introduces a new layer of statistical and computational issues. This article lays out the components of a statistical semant...

Semantic parsing, i.e., the automatic derivation of meaning representation such as an instantiated predicate-argument structure for a sentence, plays a critical role in deep processing of natural language. Unlike all other top systems of semantic dependency parsing that have to rely on a pipeline framework to chain up a series of submodels each specialized for a specific subtask, the one presented in this article integrates everything into one model, in hopes of achieving des...

Part-of-speech (POS) tagging is a fundamental component for performing natural language tasks such as parsing, information extraction, and question answering. When POS taggers are trained in one domain and applied in significantly different domains, their performance can degrade dramatically. We present a methodology for rapid adaptation of POS taggers to new domains. Our technique is unsupervised in that a manually annotated corpus for the new domain is not necessary. We use...

This paper describes the functioning of a broad-coverage probabilistic top-down parser, and its application to the problem of language modeling for speech recognition. The paper first introduces key notions in language modeling and probabilistic parsing, and briefly reviews some previous approaches to using syntactic structure for language modeling. A lexicalized probabilistic top-down parser is then presented, which performs very well, in terms of both the accuracy of return...