Robust stochastic parsing using the inside-outside algorithm

Abstract

The paper describes a parser of sequences of (English) part-of-speech labels which utilises a probabilistic grammar trained using the inside-outside algorithm. The initial (meta)grammar is defined by a linguist and further rules compatible with metagrammatical constraints are automatically generated. During training, rules with very low probability are rejected yielding a wide-coverage parser capable of ranking alternative analyses. A series of corpus-based experiments describe the parser's performance.