Ranking Parser for a Natural Language Processing System
First Claim
1. A computer-readable storage medium having computer-executable instructions that, when executed by a computer, perform a method to parse a phrase, the method comprising:
- generating at least one parse tree representing a syntactically valid parse of the phrase, wherein the parse tree has hierarchical nodes;
calculating a syntactic history for each node.
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Abstract
A natural language parse ranker of a natural language processing (NLP) system employs a goodness function to rank the possible grammatically valid parses of an utterance. The goodness function generates a statistical goodness measure (SGM) for each valid parse. The parse ranker orders the parses based upon their SGM values. It presents the parse with the greatest SGM value as the one that most likely represents the intended meaning of the speaker. The goodness function of this parse ranker is highly accurate in representing the intended meaning of a speaker. It also has reasonable training data requirements. With this parse ranker, the SGM of a particular parse is the combination of all of the probabilities of each node within the parse tree of such parse. The probability at a given node is the probability of taking a transition (“grammar rule”) at that point. The probability at a node is conditioned on highly predicative linguistic phenomena, such as “phrase levels,” “null transitions,” and “syntactic history”
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Citations
9 Claims
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1. A computer-readable storage medium having computer-executable instructions that, when executed by a computer, perform a method to parse a phrase, the method comprising:
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generating at least one parse tree representing a syntactically valid parse of the phrase, wherein the parse tree has hierarchical nodes;
calculating a syntactic history for each node. - View Dependent Claims (2, 3)
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4. A data structure for use with a computer having a processor and a memory, said structure comprising:
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a corpus comprising one or more phrases in a natural language;
parse trees having hierarchical nodes, each tree representing at least one syntactically valid parse of each phrase in a subset of the corpus;
wherein one or more nodes have a syntactic history associated therewith. - View Dependent Claims (5, 6)
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7. A method of parsing a phrase to facilitate processing of such phrase by a computer, the method comprising:
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generating at least one parse tree representing a syntactically valid parse of the phrase, wherein the parse tree has hierarchical nodes;
calculating a syntactic history for each node. - View Dependent Claims (8, 9)
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Specification