Natural Language Processing with Python

Further Reading

Extra materials for this chapter are posted at http://www.nltk.org/, including links to freely available resources on the Web. For more examples of parsing with NLTK, please see the Parsing HOWTO at http://www.nltk.org/howto.

There are many introductory books on syntax. (O’Grady et al., 2004) is a general introduction to linguistics, while (Radford, 1988) provides a gentle introduction to transformational grammar, and can be recommended for its coverage of transformational approaches to unbounded dependency constructions. The most widely used term in linguistics for formal grammar is generative grammar, though it has nothing to do with generation (Chomsky, 1965).

(Burton-Roberts, 1997) is a practically oriented textbook on how to analyze constituency in English, with extensive exemplification and exercises. (Huddleston & Pullum, 2002) provides an up-to-date and comprehensive analysis of syntactic phenomena in English.

Chapter 12 of (Jurafsky & Martin, 2008) covers formal grammars of English; Sections 13.1–3 cover simple parsing algorithms and techniques for dealing with ambiguity; Chapter 14 covers statistical parsing; and Chapter 16 covers the Chomsky hierarchy and the formal complexity of natural language. (Levin, 1993) has categorized English verbs into fine-grained classes, according to their syntactic properties.

There are several ongoing efforts to build large-scale rule-based grammars, e.g., the LFG Pargram project (http://www2.parc.com/istl/groups/nltt/pargram/ ...