An experimental parser for syntemic grammars

We descrlbe a general parsing m e t h o d for systemic grammars. Systemic grammars contain a paradigmatic analysis of language in addition to structural information, so a parser must assign a set o f grammatical features and functions to each constituent in addition to producing a constituent structure. Our method constructs a parser by compiling systemic grammars into the notation of Functional Unification Grammar. The existing methods for parsing with unification grammars hace been e x t e n d e d t o handle a fuller range of paradigmatic descriptions. In particular, the PATR-II system has been extended by using disjunctive and conditional information in functional descriptions that are attached to phrase structure rules. The method has been tested with a large grammar of English w:hich was originally developed for text generation. This testing is the basis for some observations about the bidirectional m~e o f a grammar.