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<Paper uid="E85-1020">
  <Title>ARSING )IFFICULTIES U )HONOLOGICAL )ROCESSING IN I\[TALIAN</Title>
  <Section position="3" start_page="0" end_page="136" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1. INTRODUCTION
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> In a recent paper we presented (Delmonte, 1983) a phonological processor for Italian which has been implemented at the University of Venice and is used in a text-to-speech system (Delmonte et al., 1984) for the synthesis of Italian at the Centre of Computational Sonology of the University of Padua.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Recently the system has been equipped with a lexicon and a morphological analyser (DeImonte et al., 1985) while the parser is on its way to be built, which, since we adopt Lexical-Functiona! Grammar (LFG) (Bresnan, 1982), as background linguistic theory, should take the form of a chart, much in the vein of Kay's (1977,1979,1980) and Kaplan's (1973) functional and general syntactic parsers.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> At present we are working at the context-free grammar and the semantic information to be associated with each lexical entry. As it appears, Italian is a much more comptex language to be analysed when compared with English, German and French. As we shall discuss in the paper, difficulties arise basically because Italian has a relatively much higher freedom in the order of constituents than the above mentioned languages. Also, the phenomenon of the unexpressed Subject or Null Subject, makes the working of a parser a much harder task. In this sense, a chart being unbiased as to what procedure to adopt in the course of the analysis, will allow  the parser to benefit both from tcp-down and bottom-up procedures in an efficient way (plus the obvious back-up and parallel processing operations usually required). Besides, both semantic and grammatical features need to be present throughout the parsing process, and they will be used to guide the overall parsing strategy.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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