Source:
42nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL04), p.454-461 (2004)
Abstract:
We compare two approaches for describing and generating bodies of rules used for natural language parsing. In today's parsers rule bodies do not exist a priori but are generated on the fly, usually with methods based on n-grams, which are one particular way of inducing probabilistic regular languages. We compare two approaches for inducing such languages. One is based on n-grams, the other on minimization of the Kullback-Leibler divergence. The inferred regular languages are used for generating bodies of rules inside a parsing procedure. We compare the two approaches along two dimensions: the quality of the probabilistic regular language they produce, and the performance of the parser they were used to build. The second approach outperforms the first one along both dimensions.
