The recognition capacity of local syntactic constraints

Abstract

Givcn a grammar for a language, it is possible to create finite state mechanisms that approximate its recognition capacity. These simple automata consider only short context information~ drawn from local syntactic constraints which the grammar hnposes. While it is short of providing the strong generative capacity of the grammar, such an approximation is useful for removing most word tagging ambiguities, identifying many cases of iU-fonncd input, and assisting efficiently in othcr natural language processing tasks. Our basic approach to the acquisition and usage of local syntactic constraints was presented clsewhcre; in this papcr we present some formal and empiric-,d results pertaining to properties of the approximating automata.