Combinatory Categorial Grammar

Combinatory Categorial Grammar (CCG) is a theory of grammar developed by Mark Steedman and colleagues. The CCG web pages contain more information about the formalism: http://groups.inf.ed.ac.uk/ccg/index.html. CCG has a number of properties which make it well-suited for use in a practical parser:

• easy recovery of long-range dependencies, such as those in coordination and extraction, as a natural part of the parsing process;
• a transparent interface between surface syntax and underlying semantic representation, including predicate-argument structure;
• elementary syntactic structures (lexical categories) at the word level, allowing much of the parsing to be performed by a highly efficient finite-state supertagger (an almost-parser).