Improving search strategies

Abstract

Viewing the syntactic analysis of natural language as a search problem, the right choice of parsing strategy plays an important role in the performance of natural language [arsers. After a motivatim: of the use of various heuristic criteria, a fl'amework for defining and testing par:;[ng strategies is presented. On this basis systematic tests on different parsing strategies have been performed, the results of which are dicussed. Generally ;hese tests show that a "guided" depthoriented strategy gives a considerable reduction of search effort eompared to the classical depth.first strategy.