Parsing in Different Languages

Abstract

The function of the parser is to compute the syntactic structure of sentences, allowing the reader or listener to determine who did what and to whom and, more generally, to infer appropriate relationships between statements and entities expressed by the sentence. Among other things , its raw material consists of the order of occurrence of the individual words in the sentence, together with detailed information about these words (e.g., major category class; subcategorization information; inflections conveying information about number, gender and case; and so on). Other inputs include intonation, prosody, and punctuation.