ABSTRACT

This chapter presents basic techniques for grammar-driven natural language parsing, that is, analyzing a string of words (typically a sentence) to determine its structural description according to a formal grammar. Inmost circumstances, this is not a goal in itself but rather an intermediary step for the purpose of further processing, such as the assignment of a meaning to the sentence. To this end, the desired output of grammar-driven parsing is typically a hierarchical, syntactic structure suitable for semantic interpretation (the topic of Chapter 5). The string of words constituting the input will usually have been processed in separate phases of tokenization (Chapter 2) and lexical analysis (Chapter 3), which is hence not part of parsing proper.