Tuesday 24 June 2008

Faster parsing in Regulus using Nuance

Here's something I've been meaning to do for a while, that really should be moved up the priority stack. It should be quite easy to arrange things so that, in cases where we have compiled a grammar down to Nuance form, we use Nuance to do parsing - this ought to be much faster than the Regulus parser, and could really let us speed up corpus runs. There are at least two straightforward ways to implement it. One is to start an nl-tool process and pipe sentences into it, reading the analyses that come back. It may be even simpler to use the Regserver, now that we can connect to it from the Regulus top-level, and send an "interpret" message. More about this soon, I hope.

PS Jun 26. It was indeed very easy - I took the route of creating an nl-tool process and connecting to it with pipes. The new NUANCE_PARSER command now lets you use nl-tool as the parser. Parsing times are at least 30 times faster. Things should be checked in. More about this soon.

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