The Fulcrum Syntactic Analyzer for Russian

A bipartite system is characterized by the fact that it consists of two major portions: a machine dictionary and a translation algorithm. It differs from a tripartite system which consists of three major portions: a machine dictionary, a parsing algorithm, and a separate table of grammatical and semantic rules. In the author's opinion, the alleged advantages of a tripartite algorithm turn out to be illusory, whenever in practice the use of a realistically extensive grammar, and not just a few basic rules, is attempted. The grammar table then becomes so complex that it can no longer be handled by a simple algorithm. Then either the algorithm has to be adapted to the table, which reduces its generality, or a secondary algorithm has to be written which will show the processor the way around the table. The algorithm of a bipartite system is essentially a linguistic pattern recognition algorithm which, instead of matching portions of sentences against rules stored in a table, directs searches at the different portions of the sentence in order to identify its grammatical pattern. Thus, the essential characteristic of the algorithm is the sequencing of searches and, in each search subroutine, only as much grammatical information is used as is appropriate to the [~articular search. The rules of the grammar are in fact applied by the algorfthm in a definite order, and a given rule is~not even called unless the previous searches have led to a point where its application becomes necessary. This means that the highly complex system of rules that makes up the real grammar of a language is distributed over a correspondingly complex algorithrn which applies the rules in terms of the ordering that the structure of the language requires.