Statistical Natural Language Parsing, or Doing Well by Doing Dumb

A lecture given by Eugene Charniak of the Department of Computer Science at Brown University
February 25, 1997


We describe a parsing system based upon a language model for English that is, in turn, based upon assigning probabilities to possible parses for a sentence. This model is used in a parsing system by finding the parse for the sentence with the highest probability. This system outperforms previous schemes. As this is the third in a series of parsers by different authors that are similar enough to invite detailed comparisons but different enough to give rise to different levels of performance, we also report on some experiments desinged to identify what aspects of these systems best explain their relative performance.

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