In this paper we explore the efficiency of various ways of expressing the form and meaning of natural language utterances as context-free grammars. We concentrate on the top-down parsing strategy employed in SpeechWorks 6.5, a strategy common to many systems. As with other search-based parsers, the key to efficiency is to limit the uncertainty of the parser at any given stage by reducing non-determinism in the grammar. Here we study the effects of different expressions of the same grammar in terms of efficiency. We also describe a methodology for transforming a source grammar into a more efficient expression of the same forms and meanings.
Cite as: Carpenter, B., Lerner, S., Pieraccini, R. (2000) Optimizing BNF grammars through source transformations. Proc. 6th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (ICSLP 2000), vol. 1, 194-197, doi: 10.21437/ICSLP.2000-48
@inproceedings{carpenter00_icslp,
author={Bob Carpenter and Sol Lerner and Roberto Pieraccini},
title={{Optimizing BNF grammars through source transformations}},
year=2000,
booktitle={Proc. 6th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (ICSLP 2000)},
pages={vol. 1, 194-197},
doi={10.21437/ICSLP.2000-48}
}