Abstract Controlling Search in Flexible Parsing

Most natural language parsers require their input to be grammatical. This significantly constrains the search space that they must explore during parsing. Parsers which attempt to recover from extragrammatical input contend with a search space that is potentially much larger, since they cannot necessarily prune branches when grammatical expectations are violated. In this paper we discuss the control structure of the experimental MULTIPAR parser, which directs its search by exploring potential parses in order of their degree of grammatical deviation/