Towards a Principled Computational System of Syntactic Ambiguity Detection and Representation

This paper presents the current status of a research project in computational linguistics/natural language processing whose main objective is to develop a symbolic, principle-based, bottom-up system in order to process and parse sequences of lexical items as declarative sentences in English. For each input sequence, the parser should produce (maximally) binary trees as generated by the Merge operation on lexical items. Due to parametric variations in the algorithm, the parser should be able to output (up to four) grammatically feasible structural representations accounted by alternative constituent analyses because of structural ambiguities in the parsing of the input string. Finally, the system should be able to state whether a particular string of lexical items is a possible sentence in account of its parsability. The system has a scalable software framework that may be suitable for the analysis of typologically-diverse natural languages.