From mick@ee.su.oz.au Mon Jan 17 13:55:28 EST 1994
Article: 1078 of comp.ai.nat-lang
Xref: glinda.oz.cs.cmu.edu comp.ai.nat-lang:1078
Newsgroups: comp.ai.nat-lang
Path: honeydew.srv.cs.cmu.edu!fs7.ece.cmu.edu!europa.eng.gtefsd.com!uunet!munnari.oz.au!yoyo.aarnet.edu.au!news.adelaide.edu.au!basser.cs.su.oz.au!metro!ee.su.oz.au!mick
From: mick@ee.su.oz.au (Michael O'Donnell)
Subject: Re: Halliday Parser
Message-ID: <CJpqHK.Ko6@ucc.su.OZ.AU>
Sender: news@ucc.su.OZ.AU
Nntp-Posting-Host: brutus.ee.su.oz.au
Organization: School of Electrical Engineering, University of Sydney
Date: Sun, 16 Jan 1994 08:05:43 GMT
Lines: 111

> Can someone help me building a Halliday parser? > (Or has someone 
build one?)

   There have been several implementations of Systemic parsers, which I 
will outline shortly. Note however that none of these are much good for 
analysing real text (except for a small prepared corpus), largely because 
we haven't developed grammars with adequate coverage yet. The NIGEL 
grammar from the Penman project (ISI) is reasonably  large, yet when we 
have applied it to a corpus, very few sentences parse without problems.  I 
could make a point that grammars which try to recognise just nouns and 
verbs are easy to write (while the systemic goal is to recover three layers 
of semantic information), but I will refrain.

  The NIGEL grammar is an approximation of Halliday's /Introduction to 
Functional Grammar/, mainly developed by Christian Matthiessen and 
others from ISI. There  have been two attempts at parsing with it:

  1) Bob Kasper: Converts the NIGEL grammar into a unification 
formalism (PATR)   and uses PATR to parse. Very slow, and only 
worked on a handful of sentences.

  2)  Mick O'Donnell (me): parse a pruned version of the NIGEL 
grammar directly,  and use all sorts of tricks to get the analyses done in 
realistic time. Still slow,  and limited in the sentences it handles. Not 
really usable if you want a short-cut to anlysing huge amounts of text. 
Distribution of a mini-grammar parsing/generationsystem is expected 
when I finish my PHD which is soon.

  Two parsers have been written to handle Robin Fawcett's GENESYS 
grammar, which  differs from Halliday's in various ways:  Tim 
O'Donoghue, and Ruvan Weerasinghe. 

   Below is a bibliography of work in Systemic Parsing:

Bateman John, Emele Martin and Momma Stefan, 1992 "The 
nondirectional representation  of Systemic Functional Grammars and 
Semantics as Typed Feature Structures" in  Proceedings of COLING-92, 
Volume III, Nantes, France, pp916-920.

Cummings Michael and Regina Al. 1985 "A PROLOG parser-generator 
for Systemic  analysis of Old English Nominal Groups", in Benson, J.  
& Greaves, W. (eds.). 1985  Systemic Perspectives on Discourse, 
Volume 1. Norwood: Ablex.

Kasper, Robert 1986 Systemic Grammar and Functional Unification 
Grammar In Benson,  J. and Greaves, W., Selected Papers from the 12th 
International Systemics Workshop.  Ablex, Norwood, N.J., USA.

Kasper, Robert 1987a Feature Structures: A logical Theory with 
Application to Language  Analysis. PH.D. dissertation, University of 
Michigan

Kasper, Robert 1987b "A Unification  Method for Disjunctive Feature 
Descriptions" in  Proceedings of the 25th Annual Meeting of the 
Association for Computational Linguistics,  held July 6-9, 1987 
Stanford, California.

Kasper, Robert 1988a "An Experimental Parser for Systemic 
Grammars", Proceedings of  the 12th Int. Conf. on Computational 
Linguistics, Budapest, Association for  Computational Linguistics.

Kasper, Robert 1988b  "Parsing with Systemic Grammar", Mimeo.

Kasper, Robert 1989 "Unification and Classification: An Experiment in 
Information-Based  Parsing" In Proceedings of the  International 
Workshop on Parsing Technologies, pages 1- 7, CMU, Pittsburgh.

Kasper, Robert 1990 "Performing Integrated Syntactic and Semantic 
Parsing Using  Classification" paper presented at  Darpa Workshop on 
Speech and NL Processing,  Pittsburgh, June 1990.

McCord, Michael C. 1977 "Procedural Systemic Grammars" in Int. J. 
Man-Machine  Studies, 9, pp255-286. Academic Press, London.

Mellish,  C. S. 1988 "Implementing Systemic Classification by 
Unification",  Computational Linguistics, Vol. 14, Number 1, Winter 
1988.

O'Donnell, Michael 1993 "Reducing Complexity in a Systemic Parser" in 
Proceedings of  the Third International Workshop on Parsing 
Technologies", Tilburg, the Netherlands,  August 10-13.

O'Donnell, Michael 1991 "EDA Reference Guide: Computational 
Processes I:Parser"  Project report to Fujitsu (japan) - a good description 
of my parser - can send on request.

O'Donoghue, Tim F. 1991a "The Vertical Strip Parser: A lazy approach 
to parsing"  Research Report 91.15, School of Computer Studies, 
University of Leeds, Leeds, UK.

O'Donoghue, Tim F. 1991b "A Semantic Interpreter for Systemic 
Grammars" in  Proceedings of the ACL Workshop on Reversible 
Grammars, University of California at  Berkeley, June 1991.

Weerasinghe A. Ruvan and Robin Fawcett  "Probabilistic Incremental 
Parsing in Systemic  Functional Grammar" in Proceedings of the Third 
International Workshop on Parsing  Technologies", Tilburg, the 
Netherlands, August 10-13, 1993.

Winograd, Terry 1972 Understanding Natural Language. Academic 
Press.



Mick O'Donnell 
University of Sydney 
Australia 

mick@ee.su.oz.au