Statistical Techniques for Natural Language Parsing

I review current statistical work on syntactic parsing and then consider part-of-speech tagging, which was the first syntactic problem to successfully be attacked by statistical techniques and also serves as a good warm-up for the main topic--statistical parsing. Here, I consider both the simplified case in which the input string is viewed as a string of parts of speech and the more interesting case in which the parser is guided by statistical information about the particular words in the sentence. Finally, I anticipate future research directions. In this example, I adopt the standard abbreviations: s for sentence, np for noun phrase, vp for verb phrase, and det for determiner. It is generally accepted that finding the sort of structure shown in figure 1 is useful in determining the meaning of a sentence.