Carroll, J. (1983) `An island parsing interpreter for the full augmented transition network formalism'. In Proceedings of the 1st Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Pisa, Italy. 101-105.
Island parsing is a powerful technique for parsing with Augmented
Transition Networks (ATNs) which was developed and successfully
applied in the HWIM speech understanding project. The HWIM
application grammar did not, however, exploit Woods' original full
ATN specification. This paper describes an island parsing interpreter
based on HWIM, but containing substantial and important extensions to
enable it to interpret any grammar which conforms to that full specification
of 1970. The most important contributions have been to eliminate the
need for prior specification of scope clauses, to provide more
power by implementing LIFTR and SENDR actions within the island
parsing framework, and to improve the efficiency of the techniques
used to merge together partially-built islands within the utterance.
This paper also presents some observations about island parsing, based on
the use of the parser described, and some suggestions for future
directions for island parsing research.
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