Confluent Preorder Parser as Finite State Automata

We present the Confluent Preorder Parser (CPP) in which syntactic parsing is achieved via a holistic transformation from the sentence representation to the desired parse tree representation. Simulation results show that CPP has achieved excellent generalization performance and is capable of handling erroneous sentences and resolving syntactic ambiguities. An analysis is presented which elucidates the operations of CPP as governed by a finite state automaton. The parsing is interpreted as a series of decision makings during the process. Based on this formalism, syntactic parsing and generalization by CPP can be explained in terms of state transitions.