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Question

What is the name of free natural language parser?

Answer

Parsing algorithms for natural language cannot rely on the grammar having 'nice' properties as with manually-designed grammars for programming languages. As mentioned earlier some grammar formalisms are very computationally difficult to parse; in general, even if the desired structure is not context-free, some kind of context-free approximation to the grammar is used to perform a first pass. Algorithms which use context-free grammars often rely on some variant of the CKY algorithm, usually with some heuristic to prune away unlikely analyses to save time. (See chart parsing.) However some systems trade speed for accuracy using, eg, linear-time versions of the shift-reduce algorithm. A somewhat recent development has been parse reranking in which the parser proposes some large number of analyses, and a more complex system selects the best option.

— Source: Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org)