Principle-based Parsing

The paperback edition of one of the first books to appear on a new approach to natural language analysis - principle-based parsing. Based on a series of seminars given by the contributors at MIT and grounded in the recent developments in linguistic theory developed at MIT and elsewhere, this volume shows how the large rule-based and language-specific systems that have dominated the conventional computational approach to language may be replaced by a handful of interacting, language-universal principles. The book covers all areas of natural language from this new perspective: parsing, language acquisition, language variation, machine translation, and psycholinguistics. Each of the chapters focuses on one or more of these areas, presenting implemented and tested computer or psychological models. The introduction by Berwick surveys the field from a unified vantage point, explaining in a readily-accessible way the strengths and weaknesses of this rapidly-developing new approach to natural language analysis.