network grammar

A term used for a class of GRAMMARS which have developed out of the concerns of COMPUTATIONAL LINGUISTICS and artificial intelligence, to show how LANGUAGE understanding can be simulated. A network is a state-and-path REPRESENTATION of a SENTENCE – ‘states’ being the points at which a new condition can be introduced, in putting together a CONSTRUCTION, and ‘paths’ being the transitions between states, which are dependent on a condition being met. Two main types of network grammar have been proposed: PROCEDURAL GRAMMARS and augmented TRANSITION NETWORK GRAMMARS. These grammars extract and store information from a TEXT, and use the results to decide what grammatical and SEMANTIC structures lie behind it. The grammatical breakdown of a text is known as a PARSE, which contains SYNTACTIC, semantic and REFERENTIAL information. In this approach, the analysis is presented pictorially (using rectangles, circles and lines) as well as in words and formulae.