Abstract

While symbolic parsers can be viewed as deduction systems, this view is less natural for probabilistic parsers. We present a view of parsing as directed hypergraph analysis which naturally covers both symbolic and probabilistic parsing. We illustrate the approach by showing how a dynamic extension of Dijkstra’s algorithm can be used to construct a probabilistic chart parser with an Ç´Ò¿µ time bound for arbitrary PCFGs, while preserving as much of the flexibility of symbolic chart parsers as allowed by the inherent ordering of probabilistic dependencies.