Combining Statistical Models with Symbolic Grammar in Parsing

Junichi Tsujii

Department of Computer Science, University of Tokyo, Japan
School of Computer Science, University of Manchester, UK

There are two streams of research in Computational Linguistics and
Natural language Processing, the empiricist and rationalist
traditions. Theories and computational techniques in these two streams
have been developed separately and different in nature.  Although the
two traditions have been considered irreconcilable and have often been
antagonistic toward each other, I have contention with this assertion,
and thus claim that these two research streams in linguistics, despite
or due to their differences, can be complementary to each other and
should be combined into a unified methodology. I will demonstrate in
my talk that there have been interesting developments in this
direction of integration, and would like to discuss some of the recent
results with their implications on engineering application.