Parsing can be defined as the decomposition of complex structures into their constituent parts, and parsing technology as the methods, the tools and the software to parse automatically. Parsing is a central area of research in the automatic processing of human language. Parsers are being used in many application areas, for example question answering, extraction of information from text, speech recognition and understanding, and machine translation. New developments in parsing technology are thus widely applicable. This book contains contributions from many of today's leading researchers in the area of natural language parsing technology. The contributors describe their most recent work and a diverse range of techniques and results. This collection provides an excellent picture of the current state of affairs in this area. This volume is the third in a line of such collections, and its breadth of coverage should make it suitable both as an overview of the current state of the field for graduate students, and as a reference for established researchers.
This volume is of specific interest to researchers, advanced undergraduate students, graduate students, and teachers in the following areas: Computational Linguistics, Artificial Intelligence, Computer Science, Language Engineering, Information Science, and Cognitive Science. It will also be of interest to designers, developers, and advanced users of natural language processing software and systems, including applications such as machine translation, information extraction, spoken dialogue, multimodal human-computer interaction, text mining, and semantic web technology.