A one-pass valency-oriented chunker for German

Résumé En

Non-finite state parsers provide fine-grained information. However, they are computationally demanding. Therefore, it is interesting to see how far a shallow parsing approach is able to go. In a pattern-based matching operation, the transducer described here consists of POS-tags using regular expressions that take advantage of the characteristics of German grammar. The process aims at finding linguistically relevant phrases with a good precision, which enables in turn an estimation of the actual valency of a given verb. The chunker reads its input exactly once instead of using cascades, which greatly benefits computational efficiency. This finite-state chunking approach does not return a tree structure, but rather yields various kinds of linguistic information useful to the language researcher. Possible applications include simulation of text comprehension on the syntactical level, creation of selective benchmarks and failure analysis.