Transition and Parsing State and Incrementality in Dynamic Syntax

This paper presents an implementation of a gramar of Dynamic Syntax for Japanese. Dynamic Syntax is a grammar formalism which enables a parser to process a sentence in an incremental fashion, establishing the semantic representation. Currently the application of lexical rules and transition rules in Dynamic Syntax is carried out arbitrarily and this leads to inefficient parsing. This paper provides an algorithm of rule application and partitioned parsing state for efficient parsing with special reference to processing Japanese, which is one of head-final languages. At the present stage the parser is still small but can parse scrambled sentences, relative clause constructions, and embedded clauses. The parser is written in Prolog and this paper shows that the parser can process null arguments in a complex sentence in Japanese.