What is Parsing in NLP?

Nilesh Parashar
4 min readDec 9, 2022

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The term “parsing,” whose origin is from the Latin word “pars,” which means “part,” is used to pull precise meaning or dictionary meaning from the text. The word “parsing” comes from the Latin word “pars,” which means “part.” Syntactic analysis and syntax analyses are both names for the same thing. Syntax analysis examines whether or not a document makes sense by comparing its contents to the principles of formal grammar. A parser or syntactic analyzer would not accept a statement such as “Give me hot ice-cream,” for example, since it is grammatically incorrect.

In this context, the terms “parsing,” “syntactic analysis,” and “syntax analysis” may be defined as follows:

  1. The process of analyzing the strings of symbols in natural language in accordance with the norms of formal grammar is one way to describe it. Several reputed institutes now offer the best online data science courses.

2. With the aid of the points listed below, we may get an understanding of the significance of parsing in NLP:

A Parser is What You Need to Report Any Errors with the Syntax

It assists in recovering from errors that are often experienced, allowing the processing of the remaining portions of the program to continue uninterrupted.

A Parser is Used to Assist in the Generation of a Parse Tree

In natural language processing (NLP), the symbol table that is generated by the parser is an essential component. In addition to that, the parser is used to create intermediate representations (IR).

THERE ARE MANY DISTINCT KINDS OF PARSERS

As was previously said, the definition of a parser may be summed up as a procedural interpretation of grammar. After looking through the area occupied by a number of trees, it arrives at the best tree option for the statement that was provided. Let’s have a look at some of the parsers that are accessible down below.

Recursive Descent Parser

Recursive descent among the many types of parsing, parsing is one of the easiest to understand. The recursive descent parser is discussed in more depth below, along with some key considerations.

  1. It works from the highest level down to the lowest.
  2. It makes an effort to validate the correctness or incorrectness of the syntax of the input stream.
  3. It reads the sentence from left to right, as it was entered.
  4. In order for a recursive descent parser to function properly, one of its required operations is to read characters from the input stream and then match those characters with the terminals from the grammar.

Shift-Reduce Parser

The shift-reduce parser will be discussed further after the following crucial points:

  1. It is a straightforward procedure working from the ground up.
  2. It searches for a string of words and phrases that match to the right-hand side of a grammatical production and then attempts to replace those words and phrases with the material that belongs on the left-hand side of the production.
  3. The effort to locate a sequence of words that was just described will continue until the whole phrase has been cut down.
  4. To put it another way, the shift-reduce parser begins with the input symbol and works its way toward the start symbol while attempting to build the parser tree.

Chart Parser

The following is a list of key information about chart parser:

  1. It is most helpful or appropriate for ambiguous grammars, especially the grammars of natural languages. [Case in point:] [Case in point:]
  2. In order to solve the parsing issues, it utilizes dynamic programming.
  3. A framework known as a ‘chart’ is used to hold the partially postulated outcomes that are generated as a consequence of dynamic programming.
  4. The ‘chart’ may also be utilized in a different way.

Regexp Parser

The regular expression (Regexp) parsing approach is one of the most frequently used parsing techniques. The following is a list of key information about the Regexp parser:

  1. On top of a string that has been POS-tagged, it makes use of a regular expression that is specified in the form of grammar, as the name suggests.
  2. It simply works by applying these regular expressions to the phrases that are supplied in order to construct a parse tree network from the data that is provided.

Dependency Parsing

Dependency Parsing, often known as DP, is a relatively new parsing process. The key idea behind DP is that every linguistic unit, or word, has a direct connection to every other word in the language. In linguistic parlance, we refer to these direct connections as “dependencies.” Reputed institutes offer the machine learning course online as well.

NLTK Package

The two approaches to dependency parsing that we have followed with NLTK are as follows:

The Stanford CoreNLP Parser

Using NLTK in this manner enables us to do dependency parsing for the first time. However, this particular parser has the limitation that it can only be trained with a restricted data set.

Stanford parser

NLTK provides us with another option for doing dependency parsing. The Stanford parser is a dependency parser that is considered to be state-of-the-art. NLTK is encased in a wrapper at the moment. Downloading the following two items is required before we can utilize it.

  1. The CoreNLP parser developed at Stanford.
  2. Language model for desired language.

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Nilesh Parashar

I am a marketing and advertising student at Hinduja College, Mumbai University, Mumbai, and I have been studying advertising since 4 years.