Resolving Lexical Ambiguity in a Deterministic Parser

Lexical ambiguity and especially part-of-speech ambiguity is the source of much non-determinism in parsing. As a result, the resolution of lexical ambiguity presents deterministic parsing with a major test. If deterministic parsing is to be viable, it must be shown that lexical ambiguity can be resolved easily deterministically. In this paper, it is shown that Marcus's "diagnostics" can be handled without any mechanisms beyond what is required to parse grammatical sentences and reject ungrammatical sentences. It is also shown that many other classes of ambiguity can be easily resolved as well.