Elsevier

Advances in Computers

Volume 8, 1967, Pages 153-188
Advances in Computers

Syntactic Analysis of Natural Language

https://doi.org/10.1016/S0065-2458(08)60696-8Get rights and content

Publisher Summary

The methods of syntactic analysis, segment a sentence into parts and these in turn into smaller parts. The chapter discusses the relevance of string analysis for computational purposes. It overcomes the problem of discontinuity in a natural way and provides a framework for introducing further linguistic refinements without adding appreciably to the bulk or complexity of the grammar. These features are both because the linguistic string is the least segment of a sentence with respect to which grammatical restrictions can be stated. The chapter describes the left-to-right procedure for string analysis of sentences and the computer program based on it, which emphasizes the means of handling such essential features of language structure as detailed subclass restrictions, coordinate and comparative conjunctions, and syntactic ambiguity. The left-to-right procedure for string analysis of sentences is based on an axiomatic formulation of linguistic string theory, which presents, in terms of particular syntactic categories for words of the language, a set of elementary strings of word categories and rules for combining the elementary strings to form sentences.

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