A BOOTSTRAPPING APPROACH TO PARSER DEVELOPMENT

This paper presents a robust parsing system for unrestricted Basque texts. It analyzes a sentence in two stages: a unification-based parser builds basic syntactic units such as NPs, PPs, and sentential complements, while a finite-state parser performs syntactic disambiguation and filtering of the results. The system has been applied to the acquisition of verbal subcategorization information, obtaining 66% recall and 87% precision in the determination of verb subcategorization instances. This information will be later incorporated to the parser, in order to improve its performance.