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Natural Language Parsing Systems
Parsing with Logical Variables
January 1, 1987
Logic based programming systems have enjoyed increasing popularity in applied AI work in the last few years. One of the contributions that the logic programming paradigm has made to computational linguistics is the Definite Clause Grammar (DCG). An excellent introduction to this formalism can be found in [9] in which the authors present the formalism and make a detailed comparison to Augmented Transition Networks (ATN) as a means of both specifying a language and parsing sentences in that language. We feel that the major strengths offered by the DCG formalism arise from its use of logical variables with unification as the fundamental operation on them. These techniques can be abstracted from the theorem proving paradigm and adapted to other parsing systems. We have implemented an experimental ATN system which treats ATN registers as logic variables and provides a unification operation over them.
InBook
Springer Berlin Heidelberg
Leonard Bolc
- This is a slightly revised version of a paper that appeared in the Proceedings of the First Conference on Applied Natural Language Processing in 1983.
- DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-83030-3_2
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