Parsers and Grammar

action name	parse
resources required	grammar
properties	Grammar.fileName
annotations required	constit (for lexical items)
annotations added	constit

The Jet parser, in combination with a grammar, can be used to generate a syntactic analysis of input sentences. The parser supports only context-free grammars without feature constraints or probabilities, and so is intended for relatively simple grammars. For broad-coverage analysis of arbitrary sentence input, the statistical parser (statParser) should be used.

If a parse is obtained, parse adds an annotation of the form <constit cat=category children=[child₁ child₂ ...]> for each non-terminal constituent in the parse tree. Here category is the non-terminal grammar category and child₁ child₂ ... are the annotations of the immediate constituent nodes. (If multple parses are obtained, separate sets of annotations are added for each parse.)

Format of the grammar:

The grammar consists of a set of definitions, where each definition has the form

symbol := element element ... | element element ... | ... ;

and each element is either a non-terminal symbol (defined elsewhere in the grammar), a pre-terminal symbol (defined in the lexicon), or a string
(enclose in double quotes). For example,

     sentence := np vp;
   np       := n | art n | art adj n;
   vp       := v | v np | v np "to" np;

The grammar file is free format: spaces, tabs, and newlines may be used freely. Definitions in the grammar and lexicon must end with semicolons (;). Java-style comments (both // and /* ... */) are allowed.

Types of parsers

The Parser menu on the Jet console allows you to select the parser to be used:

a top-down, backtracking recognizer (which does not produce a parse tree)
a top-down, backtracking parser
a bottom-up ('immediate-constituent analyzer') parser
a chart parser

This menu allows you to turn a parser trace on or off (the trace is displayed in the console). It also allows you to display a parse as a tree diagram.

Parser traces

The top-down parser operates with a goal stack. It produces the message "looking for x" when it removes x (a symbol or string) from the goal stack (and then tries to satisfy this goal, by either looking for an instance of x as the next word in the sentence, or by expanding x using its definition), and the message "found x" when it is has succeeded in building a node of type x. The bottom-up parser produces the message "adding node x" when it has succeeded in building a node of type x.