Natural Language Syntax: Parsing and Complexity

About

This course aims to provide an introduction to the fields of formal grammars and syntactic parsing, with a focus on their application to natural language. We introduce the concepts of formal language, formal grammar and automaton, and the notion of complexity reflected by the Chomsky-Schützenberger hierarchy. We present how natural language and popular syntactic formalisms fit into this picture. We review at length the evolution of parsing algorithms for natural language, from the classic chart-based paradigm to contemporary shift-reduce parsers, graph-based algorithms, and CCG parsing. We discuss the impact on the field of the advances in machine-learning and introduce some of the key aspects of neural-based parsers and in particular the use of the vector representations of linguistic units produced by language models.

Course leader

Timothée Bernard and Pascal Amsili

Target group

Students

Fee info