We argue for a performance-based design of natural language grammars and their associated parsers in order to meet the constraints imposed by real-world NLP. Our approach incorporates declarative and procedural knowledge about language and language use within an object-oriented specification framework. We discuss several message-passing protocols for parsing and provide reasons for sacrificing completeness of the parse in favor of efficiency based on a preliminary empirical evaluation.
Categories: cmp-lg cs.CL