A Linguistic Theory of Robustness

Syntactical robustness is a desired design properry of natural language parsers. Within the past decade, several developmental robustness approaches have been %rwarded: Syntax-free semantic passing [1] co,~lstraint relaxation after parse failure in a pat tern matching [2] or ATN framework [:3,4], parse tree fittiug [5] and several non-formalized case frame approaches (e.g. the parser series in [6,7]). Three approaches [5,8,9] account for special defectivities by extending grarnmatical coverage. This paper refo,:mulates the so-called weakness approach, first, published in [I0], which extends robustness to declarative parsing formalisms.