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<Paper uid="E91-1027">
  <Title>THE RECOGNITION CAPACITY OF LOCAL SYNTACTIC CONSTRAINTS</Title>
  <Section position="3" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1. Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Parsing is a process by which an input sentence is not only recognized as belonging to the language, but is also assigned a structure. As \[l\]erwick/Wcinbcrg 84\] commcnt, recognition per se (i.e. a weak generative capacity analysis) is not of much value for a theory of language understanding, but it can be useful &amp;quot;as a diagnostic&amp;quot;. We claim that if an cfficient recognition procedure is availat~le, it can be tnost valuable as a prc-parsing reducer of lcxical ambiguity (especially, as \[Milne 86\] points out, for detcnninistic parsers), and cvcn more useful in applications where full parsing is not absolutely required e.g. identification of iU-formed inputs in a text critique program. Still weaker than recognition procedures are 'methods which approximate the recognition capacity. This is the kind of methods that we discuss in this paper.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> More specifically, we analyze the recognition capacity of automata based on local (short context) considerations. In \[Herz/Rimon 91\] we prescnted our approach to the acquisition and usage of local syntactic constraints, focusing on its use for reduction of word-level ambiguity.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> After briefly reviewing this method in section 2 below, we examine in more detail various characteristics of the approximating automata, and suggest several applications.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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