A memory-based model of syntactic analysis: data-oriented parsing

Abstract

This paper presents a memory-based model of human syntactic processing: Parsing. After a brief introduction (section 1), it argues that any account of disambiguation and many other performance phenomena inevitably has an important memory-based component (section 2). It discusses the limitations of probabilistically enhanced competence-grammars, and argues for a more principled memory-based approach (section 3). In sections 4 and 5, one part icular memory-based model is described in some detail: a simple instantiation of the Data-Oriented Parsing approach (DOP1). Section 6 reports on experimentally established properties of this model , and section 7 compares it with other memory-based techniques. Section 8 concludes and points to futur e work.