Trends in syntactic parsing: anticipation, Bayesian estimation, and good-enough parsing

Abstract

Syntactic parsing processes establish dependencies between words in a sentence. These dependencies affect how comprehenders assign meaning to sentence constituents. Classical approaches to parsing describe it entirely as a bottom-up signal analysis. More recent approaches assign the comprehender a more active role, allowing the comprehender's individual experience, knowledge, and beliefs to influence his or her interpretation. This review describes developments in three related aspects of sentence processing research: anticipatory processing, Bayesian/noisy-channel approaches to sentence processing, and the 'good-enough' parsing hypothesis.

Keywords: Bayes’ theorem; good-enough parsing; noisy channels; parsing; syntax.