Parsing a Natural Language Using Mutual Information Statistics

The purpose of this paper is to characterize a constituent boundary parsing algorithm, using an information-theoretic measure called generalized mutual information, which serves as an alternative to traditional grammar-based parsing methods. This method is based on the hypothesis that constituent boundaries can be extracted from a given sentence (or word sequence) by analyzing the mutual information values of the part-ofspeech n-grams within the sentence. This hypothesis is supported by the performance of an implementation of this parsing algorithm which determines a recursive unlabeled bracketing of unrestricted English text with a relatively low error rate. This paper derives the generalized mutual information statistic, describes the parsing algorithm, and presents results and sample output from the parser.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1990
• Where: AAAI
• Authors: David M. Magerman, Mitchell P. Marcus
• Keywords: AAAI 1990, Constituent Boundary Parsing, Generalized Mutual Information, Intelligent Agents, Parsing Algorithm