Statistically driven computer grammars of English : the IBM Lancaster approach Klappentext: This book is about building computer programs that parse (analyze or diagram) sentences of a real world English. The English we are concerned with might be a corpus of everyday naturally occurring prose such as the entire text of this mornings newspaper. Most programs that now exist for this purpose are not very successful at finding the correct analysis for everyday sentences. In contrast the programs described here make use of a more successful statistically driven approach. Our book is first a record of a five year research collaboration between IBM and Lancaster University. Large numbers of real world sentences were fed into the memory of a program for grammatical analysis (including a detailed grammar of English) and processed by statistical methods. The idea is to single out the correct parse among all those offered by the grammar on the basis of probabilities. Second this is a how to book showing how to build and implement a statistically driven broad coverage grammar of English. We even supply our own grammar with the necessary statistical algorithms and with the knowledge needed to prepare a very large set (or corpus) of sentences so that it can be used to guide the statistical processing of the grammars rules.