Constraining a Deterministic Parser

Abstract

At the Naval Research Laboratory, we are building a deterministic parser, based on principles proposed by Marcus, that can be used in interpreting military message narrative. A central goal of our project is to make the parser useful for real-time applications by constraining the parser's actions and so enhancing its efficiency. In this paper, we propose that a parser can determine the correct structures for English without looking past the left corner of a constituent, i.e. the leftmost element of the constituent along with its lexical category (e.g. N, V, Adj). We show that this Left Corner Constraint, which has been built into our parser, leads quite naturally to a description of verb complements in English that is consistent with the findings of recent linguistic theory, in particular, Chomsky's government and binding (GB) framework.