Parsing Ill-Formed Text Using an Error Grammar

This paper presents a robust parsing approach which is designed to address the issue of syntactic errors in text. The approach is based on the concept of an error grammar which is a grammar of ungrammatical sentences. An error grammar is derived from a conventional grammar on the basis of an analysis of a corpus of observed ill-formed sentences. A robust parsing algorithm is presented which is applied after a conventional bottom-up parsing algorithm has failed. This algorithm combines a rule from the error grammar with rules from the normal grammar to arrive at a parse for an ungrammatical sentence. This algorithm is applied to 50 test sentences, with encouraging results.

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2004
• Where: AIR
• Authors: Jennifer Foster, Carl Vogel
• Keywords: AIR 2004, Error Grammar, Robust Parsing, Ungrammatical Sentence