Section: New Results

Coordination Parsing

Participants : Bruno Guillaume, Guy Perrier.

In the development of the French grammar, FRIGRAM, Joseph Le Roux and Guy Perrier have tackled the difficult problem of modelling and parsing coordination [39] . They have enriched FRIGRAM with a module expressing different syntactic constructions with coordination. An important drawback of this approach is the number of elementary constructions that have to introduced to obtain a reasonable coverage of the phenomenon.

In the continuation of his Master thesis, Valmi Dufour-Lussier with Bruno Guillaume and Guy Perrier worked on a different approach. They propose to process coordination at the parsing level as a linguistic performance issue, outside the grammar, rather than as a matter of competence [15] . They apply a specific algorithm to combine coordinated syntactic structures that were partially parsed using a coordination-less grammar, resulting in a directed acyclic parse graph in which constituent sharing appears sharply. They have experimented the algorithm within the framework of Tree-Adjoining Grammars (although it can be adapted to other formalisms) on a small subset of the Penn Treebank (http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~treebank/ ). They have shown that it is able to handle many types of coordinative constructions, including left and right node raising, argument clusters, and verb gapping.