Parsing Languages with a Configurator

Recent evolution of linguistic theories heavily rely upon the concept of constraint. Also, several authors have pointed out the similitude existing between the categories of feature-based theories and the notions of objects or frames. We show that a generalization of constraint programs called configuration programs can be applied to natural language parsing. We propose here a systematic translation of the concepts and constraints introduced by property grammars to configuration problems representing specific target languages. We assess the usefulness of this translation by studying first a recursive (context free) language with semantics, and a natural language subset with lexical ambiguities. Our experiments show the practical efficiency of this approach, which does not require the use of ad hoc algorithms and can be freely used in analysis, generative, or hybrid mode.