Improving the performance of the link parser

Abstract

The paper describes an approach to extend the coverage of a Link Grammar based parser on the constructions that are not being handled currently by the grammar. There are about thirty types of constructions which we have identified till now. In order to make Link Grammar handle these constructions, we introduce a preprocessor and a postprocessor. The idea is to handle such constructions via some analysis and transformations in a preprocessing phase before the sentence is given to the Link Parser and then by adding the missing links in the postprocessing phase. The main part of the paper discusses the constructions not handled by the parser and introduces rule based preprocessor and postprocessor. This simple and flexible approach is able to increase the coverage of the parser significantly and allows even a relatively naive user to improve the performance of the parser without disturbing the core grammar. © 2009 IEEE.