Treebank Grammars and Other Infinite Parameter Models
Detlef Prescher, Remko Scha, Khalil Sima'an, Andreas Zollmann

Abstract:
Syntactic disambiguators for natural languages often use "Treebank
Grammars": probabilistic grammars which are directly projected from an
annotated corpus. In this paper we show that for describing these
systems in the framework of Estimation Theory, we must generalize this
theory so that it allows for an infinite number of
parameters. Embracing this generalization will also bring the
justification of statistical smoothing techniques within the score of
Estimation Theory.


Keywords: Computational Linguistics;  Statistical NLP;  Treebank Grammars;  Estimation Theory