Lauri Karttunen – författare

This is a collection of new papers by leading researchers on natural language parsing. In the past, the problem of how people parse the sentences they hear - determine the identity of the words in these sentences and group these words into larger units - has been addressed in very different ways by experimental psychologists, by theoretical linguists, and by researchers in artificial intelligence, with little apparent relationship among the solutions proposed by each group. However, because of important advances in all these disciplines, research on parsing in each of these fields now seems to have something significant to contribute to the others, as this volume demonstrates. The volume includes some papers applying the results of experimental psychological studies of parsing to linguistic theory, others which present computational models of parsing, and a mathematical linguistics paper on tree-adjoining grammars and parsing.

The finite-state paradigm of computer sciences has provided a basis for natural-language applications that are efficient, elegant and robust. This volume is a practical guide to finite-state theory and the affiliated programming languages lexc and xfst. Readers will learn how to write tokenizers, spelling checkers, and especially morphological analyzer/generators for words in English, French, Finnish, Hungarian and other languages. Included are graded introductions, examples, and exercises suitable for individual study as well as formal courses. These take advantage of widely tested lexc and xfst applications that are just becoming available for noncommercial use via the Internet.