A General Computational Method for Grammar Inversion

A reversible grammar is usually understood as a computational or linguistic system that can be used both for analysis and generation of the language it defines. For example, a directive pars-gen(Sent,Form) would assign, depending upon the binding status of its arguments, the representation in(Miami,chased(Fido,John)) to the sentence Fido chased John in Miami, or it would produce one of the several possible paraphrases of this sentence given its representation. Building such bi-directional systems has long been considered critical for various natural language processing tasks, especially in machine translation. This paper presents a general computational method for automated inversion of a parsing-oriented unification grammar for natural language into an efficient generating grammar. We clarify and expands the results of the earlier work on reversible grammars by this author and the others. A more powerful version of the grammar inversion algorithm is developed with a special emphasis being placed on the proper treatment of recursive rules. The grammar inversion algorithm described here is at the core of the Japanese-English machine translation project currently under development at NYU.

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