Strategy Selection for an ATN Syntactic Parser

I. It is impossible to measure the merits of a grammar, seen as the component of an analyser, in absolute terms. An "ad hoc" grammar, constructed for a limited set of sentences is, w i t h o u t d o u b t , more efficient in dealing with those particular sentences than a zrammer constructed for a larger set. Therefore, t h e first rudimentary criterion, when evaluating the relation~hlp between a grammar and a set of sentences, should be to establish whether this grammar is c a p a b l e of analysing these sentences. This is the determination of linguistic coverage, and necessitates the definition of the linguistic phenomena, independently of the linguistic theory which has been adopted to recognise these phenomena.