In wide-coverage lexicalized grammars many of the elementary structures have substructures in common. This means that in conventional parsing algorithms some of the computation associated with different structures is duplicated. In this paper we describe a precompilation technique for such grammars which allows some of this computation to be shared. In our approach the elementary structures of the grammar are transformed into finite state automata which can be merged and minimised using standard algorithms, and then parsed using an automaton-based parser. We present algorithms for constructing automata from elementary structures, merging and minimising them, and string recognition and parse recovery with the resulting grammar.
['Roger Evans', 'David J. Weir']
A Structure-sharing Parser for Lexicalized Grammars