The Chinese language has many special characteristics which are substantially different from western languages, causing conventional methods of language processing to fail on Chinese. For example, Chinese sentences are composed of strings of characters without word boundaries that are marked by spaces. Therefore, word segmentation and unknown word identification techniques must be used in order to identify words in Chinese. In addition, Chinese has very few inflectional or grammatical markers, making purely syntactic approaches to parsing almost impossible.
Hence, a unified approach which involves both syntactic and semantic
information must be used. Therefore, a lexical feature-based grammar formalism, called Information-based Case Grammar, is adopted for the parsing model proposed here. This grammar formalism stipulates that a lexical entry for a word contains both semantic and syntactic feature structures. By relaxing the constraints on lexical feature structures, even ill-formed input can be accepted, broadening the coverage of the
grammar. A model of a priority controlled chart parser is proposed which, in conjunction with a mechanismof dynamic grammar extension, addresses the problems of: (1) syntactic ambiguities, (2) under-specification and limited coverage of grammars, and (3) ill-formed sentences. The model does this without causing inefficient parsing of sentences that do not require relaxation of constraints or dynamic extension of the grammar.