Common Heuristics for Parsing, Generation, and Whatever...

Proposed here are some general heuristics to control computation on a symbolic constraint represented in terms of a first-order logic program. These heuristics are totally independent of specific domains (such as syntax and semantics) and tasks (such as parsing and generation). Efficient computation for parsing and generating sentences automatically emerge thereof, capturing the essence of standard parsing procedures and semantic head-driven generation. This is a step towards a unified architecture of natural language processing and intelligence in general in which various sorts of constraints such as grammar, lexicon and common sense are integrated in an isotropic and context-dependent fashion.