Message-Passing Protocols for Real-World Parsing -- An Object-Oriented Model and its Preliminary Evaluation

TL;DR

This paper proposes a performance-oriented, object-oriented message-passing framework for natural language parsing, emphasizing efficiency over completeness, supported by preliminary empirical results.

Contribution

It introduces a novel object-oriented model with message-passing protocols tailored for real-world NLP parsing tasks, balancing efficiency and completeness.

Findings

Message-passing protocols improve parsing efficiency

Sacrificing completeness enhances real-world applicability

Preliminary evaluation supports the proposed approach

Abstract

We argue for a performance-based design of natural language grammars and their associated parsers in order to meet the constraints imposed by real-world NLP. Our approach incorporates declarative and procedural knowledge about language and language use within an object-oriented specification framework. We discuss several message-passing protocols for parsing and provide reasons for sacrificing completeness of the parse in favor of efficiency based on a preliminary empirical evaluation.