UNIT –III

PARSING PROCESS

Parsing is the term used to describe the process of automatically building syntactic
analysis of a sentence in terms of a given grammar and lexicon. The resulting
syntactic analysis may be used as input to a process of semantic interpretation.
Occasionally, parsing is also used to include both syntactic and semantic analysis.
The parsing process is done by the parser. The parsing performs grouping and
labeling of parts of a sentence in a way that displays their relationships to each other
in a proper way.

The parser is a computer program which accepts the natural language sentence as
input and generates an output structure suitable for analysis. The lexicon is a
dictionary of words where each word contains some syntactic, some semantic and
possibly some pragmatic information. The entry in the lexicon will contain a root
word and its various derivatives. The information in the lexicon is needed to help
determine the function and meanings of the words in a sentence. The basic parsing
technique is shown in figure .

Generally in computational linguistics the lexicon supplies paradigmatic

information about words including part of speech labels, irregular plurals and sub
categorization information for verbs. Traditionally, lexicons were quite small and
were constructed largely by hand. The additional information being added to the
lexicon increase the complexity of the lexicon. The organization and entries of a
lexicon will vary from one implementation to another but they are usually made up
of variable length data structures such as lists or records arranged in alphabetical
order. The word order may also be given in terms of usage frequency so that
frequently used words like “a”, “the” and “an” will appear at the beginning of the
list facilitating the search. The entries in a lexicon could be grouped and given word
category (by articles, nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs and so on) and all
words contained within the lexicon listed within the categories to which they belong.
The entries are like a, an (determiner), be (verb), boy, stick, glass (noun), green,
yellow, red (adjectives), I, we, you, he, she, they (pronouns) etc.

In most contemporary grammatical formalisms, the output of parsing is something

logically equivalent to a tree, displaying dominance and precedence relations
between constituents of a sentence. Parsing algorithms are usually designed for
classes of grammar rather than tailored towards individual grammars.

Types of Parsing

The parsing technique can be categorized into two types such as

1. Top down Parsing

2. Bottom up Parsing

Let us discuss about these two parsing techniques and how they will work for input
sentences.

1 Top down Parsing

Top down parsing starts with the starting symbol and proceeds towards the goal. We
can say it is the process of construction the parse tree starting at the root and proceeds
towards the leaves. It is a strategy of analyzing unknown data relationships by
hypothesizing general parse tree structures and then considering whether the known
fundamental structures are compatible with the hypothesis. In
top down parsing words of the sentence are replaced by their categories like verb
phrase (VP), Noun phrase (NP), Preposition phrase (PP), Pronoun (PRO) etc. Let
us consider some examples to illustrate top down parsing. We will consider both the
symbolical representation and the graphical representation. We will take the words
of the sentences and reach at the complete sentence. For parsing we will consider
the previous symbols like PP, NP, VP, ART, N, V and so on. Examples of top down
parsing are LL (Left-to-right, left most derivation), recursive descent parser etc.

Example 1: Rahul is eating an apple.

2. Bottom up Parsing

In this parsing technique the process begins with the sentence and the words of the
sentence is replaced by their relevant symbols. This process was first suggested by
Yngve (1955). It is also called shift reducing parsing. In bottom up parsing the
construction of parse tree starts at the leaves and proceeds towards the root. Bottom
up parsing is a strategy for analyzing unknown data relationships that attempts to
identify the most fundamental units first and then to infer higher order
structures for them. This process occurs in the analysis of both natural languages and
computer languages. It is common for bottom up parsers to take the form of general
parsing engines that can wither parse or generate a parser for a specific programming
language given a specific of its grammar.

A generalization of this type of algorithm is familiar from computer science LR (k)

family can be seen as shift reduce algorithms with a certain amount (“K” words) of
look ahead to determine for a set of possible states of the parser which action to take.
The sequence of actions from a given grammar can be pre-computed to give a
‘parsing table’ saying whether a shift or reduce is to be performed and which state
to go next. Generally bottom up algorithms are more efficient than top down
algorithms, one particular phenomenon that they deal with only clumsily are “e mpty
rules”: rules in which the right hand side is the empty string. Bottom up parsers find
instances of such rules applying at every possible point in the input which can lead
to much wasted effort. Let us see some examples to illustrate the bottom up parsing.
Example-2:
The small tree shades the new house by the stream
ART small tree shades the new house by the stream

ART ADJ tree shades the new house by the stream

ART ADJ N shades the new house by the stream

ART ADJ N V the new house by the stream

ART ADJ N V ART new house by the stream

ART ADJ N V ART ADJ house by the stream

ART ADJ N V ART ADJ N by the stream

ART ADJ N V ART ADJ N PREP the stream

ART ADJ N V ART ADJ N PREP ART stream

ART ADJ N V ART ADJ N PREP ART N

ART ADJ N V ART ADJ N PREP NP

ART ADJ N V ART ADJ N PP

ART ADJ N V ART ADJ NP

ART ADJ N V ART NP

ART ADJ N V NP

ART ADJ N VP

ART NP VP
NP VP

Deterministic Parsing

A deterministic parser is one which permits only one choice for each word category.
That means there is only one replacement possibility for every word category. Thus,
each word has a different test conditions. At each stage of parsing always the correct
choice is to be taken. In deterministic parsing back tracking to some previous
positions is not possible. Always the parser has to move forward. Suppose the parser
some form of incorrect choice, then the parser will not proceed forward. This
situation arises when one word satisfies more than one word categories, such as noun
and verb or adjective and verb. The deterministic parsing network is shown in figure.

Non-Deterministic Parsing
The non deterministic parsing allows different arcs to be labeled with the some
test. Thus, they can uniquely make the choice about the next arc to be taken. In non
deterministic parsing, the back tracking procedure can be possible. Suppose at some
extent of point, the parser does not find the correct word, then at that stage it may
backtracks to some of its previous nodes and then start parsing. But the parser has to
guess about the proper constituent and then backtrack if the guess is later proven to
be wrong. So comparative to deterministic parsing, this procedure maybe helpful
for a number of sentences as it can backtrack at any point of state. A non deterministic
parsing network is shown in figure.

Context Free Grammar (CFG)

The grammar in which each production has exactly one terminal symbol in its left

handΣ,sideV,S,andP at least one symbol at the right hand side is called context free
grammar. A CFG is a four tuple where

Σ: Finite non empty set of terminals, the alphabet.

Each terminal symbol in a grammar denotes a language. The non terminals are
written in capital letters and terminals are written in small letters. Some properties
of CFG formalism are

→ Concatenation is the only string combination operation.


→ Phrase structure is the only syntactic relationship.

→ The terminal symbols have no properties.

→ Non terminal symbols are atomic.

→ Most of the information encoded in a grammar lies in the production rules.

→ Any attempt of extending the grammar with semantics requires extra means.

→ Concatenation is not necessarily the only way by which phrases may be
combined to yield other phrases.

→ Even if concatenation is the sole string operation, other syntactic
relationships are being put forward.

For example we can write the followings:

Transformational Grammar

These are the grammars in which the sentence can be represented structurally into
two stages. Obtaining different structures from sentences having the same meaning
is undesirable in language understanding systems. Sentences with the same meaning
should always correspond to the same internal knowledge structures. In one stage
the basic structure of the sentence is analyzed to determine the grammatical
constituent parts and in the second stage just the vice versa of the first one. This
reveals the surface structure of the sentence, the way the sentence is used in speech
or in writing. Alternatively, we can also say that application of the transformation
rules can produce a change from passive voice to active voice and vice versa. Let us
see the structure of a sentence as given below.

1. Ram is eating an apple (In Active Voice)

2. An apple is being eaten by Ram (In Passive Voice)

Both of the above sentences are two different sentences but they have same
meaning. Thus it is an example of a transformational grammar. These grammars
were never widely used in computational models of natural language. The
applications of this grammar are changing of voice (Active to Passive and Passive
to Active) change a question to declarative form etc.

TRANSITION NETWORK

It is a method to represent the natural languages. It is based on applications of

directed graphs and finite
state automata. The transition network can be constructed by the help of some inputs,
states and outputs. A transition network may consist of some states ornodes,
some labeled arcs from one state to the next state through which it will move. The
arc represents the rule or some conditions upon which the transition is made from
one state to another state. For example, a transition network is used to recognize a
sentence consisting of an article, a noun, an auxiliary, a verb, an article, a noun
would be represented by the transition network as follows.

The transition from N1 to N2 will be made if an article is the first input symbol. If
successful, state N2 is entered. The transition from N2 to N3 can be made if a noun
is found next. If successful, state N3 is entered. The transition from N3 to N4 can
be made if an auxiliary is found and so on. Suppose consider a sentence “A boy is
eating a banana”. So if the sent ence is parsed in the above transition network then,
first ‘A’ is an article. So successful transition t o the node N1 to N2. Then boy is a
noun (so N2 to N3), “is” is an auxiliary (N5 to N6) and finally “banana” is a noun
(N 6 to N7) is done successfully. So the above sentence is successfully parsed in
the transition network.

Augmented Transition Network (ATN)

An ATN is a modified transition network. It is an extension of RTN. The ATN

uses a top down parsing procedure to gather various types of information to be later
used for understanding system. It produces the data structure suitable for further
processing and capable of storing semantic details. An augmented transition network
(ATN) is a recursive transition network that can perform tests and take actions during
arc transitions. An ATN uses a set of registers to store information. A set of actions
is defined for each arc and the actions can look at and modify the registers. An arc
may have a test associated with it. The arc is traversed (and its action) is taken only
if the test succeeds. When a lexical arc is traversed, it is put in a special variable (*)
that keeps track of the current word. The ATN was first used in LUNAR system. In
ATN, the arc can have a further arbitrary test and anarbitrary action. The structure
of ATN is illustrated in figure. Like RTN, the structure of ATN is also consisting of
the substructures of S, NP and PP.
The ATN collects the sentence features for further analysis. The additional features
that can be captured by the ATN are; subject NP, the object NP, the subject verb
agreement, the declarative or interrogative mood, tense and so on. So we can
conclude that ATN requires some more analysis steps compared to that of RTN. If
these extra analysis tests are not performed, then there must some ambiguity in ATN.
The ATN represents sentence structure by using a slot filter representation, which
reflects more of the functional role of phrases in a sentence. For example, one noun
phrase may be identified as “subject” (SUBJ) and another as the “object”of the verb.
Wit hin noun phrases, parsing will also identify the determiner structure, adjectives,
the noun etc. For the sentence “Ram ate an apple”, we can represent as in figure.
The ATN maintains the information by having various registers like DET, ADJ
and HEAD etc. Registers are set by actions that can be specified on the arcs. When
the arc is followed, the specified action associated with it is executed. An ATN can
recognize any language that a general purpose computer can recognize. The ATNs
have been used successfully in a number of natural language systems as well as front
ends for databases and expert systems.

Case Grammars (FILLMORE’s Grammar)

Case grammars use the functional relationships between noun phrases and verbs to
conduct the more deeper case of a sentence. Generally in our English sentences,
the difference between different forms of a sentence is quite negligible. In early
1970’s Fillmore gave some idea about different cases of a English sentence. He
extended the transformational grammars of Chomsky by focusing more on the
semantic aspects of view of a sentence. In case grammars a sentence id defined as
being composed of a preposition P, a modality constituent M, composed of mood,
tense, aspect, negation and so on. Thus we can represent a sentence like

Where P - Set of relationships among verbs and noun phrases i.e. P = (C=Case)

M - Modality constituent

For example consider a sentence “Ram did not eat th e apple”.

The tree representation for a case grammar will identify the words by their modality
and case. The cases may be related to the actions performed by the agents, the
location and direction of actions. The cases may also be instrumental and objective.
For example “Ram cuts the apple by a knife”. Here knife is an instrumental case. In
fig 8.5 the modality constituent is the negation part, eat is the
verb and Ram, apple are nouns which are under the case C1 and C2 respectively.
Case frames are provided for verbs to identify allowable cases. They give the
relationships which are required and which are optional.

bhgggfdfgdfg

What is knowledge representation?

Humans are best at understanding, reasoning, and interpreting knowledge. Human
knows things, which is knowledge and as per their knowledge they perform various
actions in the real world. But how machines do all these things comes under
knowledge representation and reasoning. Hence we can describe Knowledge
representation as following:

o Knowledge representation and reasoning (KR, KRR) is the part of Artificial

intelligence which concerned with AI agents thinking and how thinking
contributes to intelligent behavior of agents.
 o It is responsible for representing information about the real world so that a
computer can understand and can utilize this knowledge to solve the complex
real world problems such as diagnosis a medical condition or communicating with
humans in natural language.

o It is also a way which describes how we can represent knowledge in artificial

intelligence. Knowledge representation is not just storing data into some
database, but it also enables an intelligent machine to learn from that knowledge
and experiences so that it can behave intelligently like a human.

What to Represent:
Following are the kind of knowledge which needs to be represented in AI systems:

o Object: All the facts about objects in our world domain. E.g., Guitars contains
strings, trumpets are brass instruments.

o Events: Events are the actions which occur in our world.

o Performance: It describe behavior which involves knowledge about how to do
things.

o Meta-knowledge: It is knowledge about what we know.

o Facts: Facts are the truths about the real world and what we represent.
o Knowledge-Base: The central component of the knowledge-based agents is the
knowledge base. It is represented as KB. The Knowledgebase is a group of the
Sentences (Here, sentences are used as a technical term and not identical with
the English language).

Knowledge: Knowledge is awareness or familiarity gained by experiences of facts,

data, and situations. Following are the types of knowledge in artificial intelligence:

Types of knowledge
Following are the various types of knowledge:
1. Declarative Knowledge:

o Declarative knowledge is to know about something.

o It includes concepts, facts, and objects.
o It is also called descriptive knowledge and expressed in declarativesentences.
o It is simpler than procedural language.

2. Procedural Knowledge

o It is also known as imperative knowledge.

o Procedural knowledge is a type of knowledge which is responsible for knowing
how to do something.

o It can be directly applied to any task.

o It includes rules, strategies, procedures, agendas, etc.
o Procedural knowledge depends on the task on which it can be applied.

3. Meta-knowledge:

o Knowledge about the other types of knowledge is called Meta-knowledge.

4. Heuristic knowledge:
 o Heuristic knowledge is representing knowledge of some experts in a filed or
subject.

o Heuristic knowledge is rules of thumb based on previous experiences, awareness

of approaches, and which are good to work but not guaranteed.

5. Structural knowledge:

o Structural knowledge is basic knowledge to problem-solving.

o It describes relationships between various concepts such as kind of, part of, and
grouping of something.

o It describes the relationship that exists between concepts or objects.

The relation between knowledge and intelligence:

Knowledge of real-worlds plays a vital role in intelligence and same for creating artificial
intelligence. Knowledge plays an important role in demonstrating intelligent behavior in
AI agents. An agent is only able to accurately act on some input when he has some
knowledge or experience about that input.

Let's suppose if you met some person who is speaking in a language which you don't
know, then how you will able to act on that. The same thing applies to the intelligent
behavior of the agents.

As we can see in below diagram, there is one decision maker which act by sensing the
environment and using knowledge. But if the knowledge part will not present then, it
cannot display intelligent behavior.
 AI
knowledge cycle:
An Artificial intelligence system has the following components for displaying intelligent
behavior:

o Perception

o Learning
o Knowledge Representation and Reasoning
o Planning
o Execution
 The above diagram is showing how an AI system can interact with the real world and
what components help it to show intelligence. AI system has Perception component by
which it retrieves information from its environment. It can be visual, audio or another
form of sensory input. The learning component is responsible for learning from data
captured by Perception comportment. In the complete cycle, the main components are
knowledge representation and Reasoning. These two components are involved in
showing the intelligence in machine-like humans. These two components are
independent with each other but also coupled together. The planning and execution
depend on analysis of Knowledge representation and reasoning.

Approaches to knowledge representation:

There are mainly four approaches to knowledge representation, which are givenbelow:

1. Simple relational knowledge:

o It is the simplest way of storing facts which uses the relational method, and each
fact about a set of the object is set out systematically in columns.

o This approach of knowledge representation is famous in database systems where

the relationship between different entities is represented.

o This approach has little opportunity for inference.

Example: The following is the simple relational knowledge representation.

Player Weight Age

Player1 65 23

Player2 58 18

Player3 75 24

2. Inheritable knowledge:
o In the inheritable knowledge approach, all data must be stored into a hierarchy
of classes.

o All classes should be arranged in a generalized form or a hierarchal manner.

o In this approach, we apply inheritance property.
o Elements inherit values from other members of a class.
 o This approach contains inheritable knowledge which shows a relation between
instance and class, and it is called instance relation.

o Every individual frame can represent the collection of attributes and its value.

o In this approach, objects and values are represented in Boxed nodes.

o We use Arrows which point from objects to their values.
o Example:

3. Inferential knowledge:
o Inferential knowledge approach represents knowledge in the form of formal
logics.

o This approach can be used to derive more facts.

o It guaranteed correctness.
o Example: Let's suppose there are two statements:
a. Marcus is a man

b. All men are mortal

Then it can represent as;

man(Marcus)
∀x = man (x)---------- > mortal (x)s
4. Procedural knowledge:
o Procedural knowledge approach uses small programs and codes which describes
how to do specific things, and how to proceed.

o In this approach, one important rule is used which is If-Then rule.

o In this knowledge, we can use various coding languages such as LISP
language and Prolog language.

o We can easily represent heuristic or domain-specific knowledge using this

approach.

o But it is not necessary that we can represent all cases in this approach.

Requirements for knowledge Representation system:

A good knowledge representation system must possess the following properties.

1. 1. Representational Accuracy:
KR system should have the ability to represent all kind of required knowledge.

2. 2. Inferential Adequacy:
KR system should have ability to manipulate the representational structures to
produce new knowledge corresponding to existing structure.

3. 3. Inferential Efficiency:
The ability to direct the inferential knowledge mechanism into the most
productive directions by storing appropriate guides.

4. 4. Acquisitional efficiency- The ability to acquire the new knowledge easily

using automatic methods.

Techniques of knowledge representation

There are mainly four ways of knowledge representation which are given as follows:

1. Logical Representation

2. Semantic Network Representation

3. Frame Representation

4. Production Rules
1. Logical Representation
Logical representation is a language with some concrete rules which deals with
propositions and has no ambiguity in representation. Logical representation means
drawing a conclusion based on various conditions. This representation lays down some
important communication rules. It consists of precisely defined syntax and semantics
which supports the sound inference. Each sentence can be translated into logics using
syntax and semantics.

Syntax:
o Syntaxes are the rules which decide how we can construct legal sentences in the
logic.

o It determines which symbol we can use in knowledge representation.

o How to write those symbols.

Semantics:
o Semantics are the rules by which we can interpret the sentence in the logic.

o Semantic also involves assigning a meaning to each sentence.

Logical representation can be categorised into mainly two logics:

a. Propositional Logics

b. Predicate logics
 Advantages of logical representation:
1. Logical representation enables us to do logical reasoning.

2. Logical representation is the basis for the programming

languages.

Disadvantages of logical Representation:

1. Logical representations have some restrictions and are
challenging to work with.

2. Logical representation technique may not be very

natural, and inference may notbe so efficient.

Note: Do not be confused with logical representation and logical reasoning as logical
representation is a representation language and reasoning is a process of thinking logically.

2. Semantic Network Representation

Semantic networks are alternative of predicate logic for
knowledge representation. In Semantic networks, we can
represent our knowledge in the form of graphical
networks.This network consists of nodes representing
objects and arcs which describe the relationship between
those objects. Semantic networks can categorize the
object in different forms and can also link those objects.
Semantic networks are easy to understand and can be
easily extended.

This representation consist of mainly two types of relations:

a. IS-A relation (Inheritance)

b. Kind-of-relation

Example: Following are some statements which we need

to represent in the form ofnodes and arcs.

Statements:
a. Jerry is a cat.

b. Jerry is a mammal

c. Jerry is owned by Priya.

d. Jerry is brown colored.

e. All Mammals are animal.