Parsing English with a Link Grammar

TL;DR

This paper introduces a link grammar formalism for English, demonstrating efficient parsing algorithms, and showing that it simplifies encoding natural language grammar with promising practical and linguistic applications.

Contribution

It presents a new link grammar system for English, with algorithms and implementation that improve ease of encoding and parsing natural language.

Findings

The link grammar captures a wide range of English phenomena.

The system is computationally efficient.

It has potential practical applications in language processing.

Abstract

We develop a formal grammatical system called a link grammar, show how English grammar can be encoded in such a system, and give algorithms for efficiently parsing with a link grammar. Although the expressive power of link grammars is equivalent to that of context free grammars, encoding natural language grammars appears to be much easier with the new system. We have written a program for general link parsing and written a link grammar for the English language. The performance of this preliminary system -- both in the breadth of English phenomena that it captures and in the computational resources used -- indicates that the approach may have practical uses as well as linguistic significance. Our program is written in C and may be obtained through the internet.