Abstract:

Writing a parser to give syntactic representations of students' input in BASIC is justified by the limited scope of the grammar required and by the need to integrate with other CALL materials. BAP (BASIC parser) is described in terms of input processing, which normalizes the sentence; word-matching, which matches it against key structure words and against its own lexicons; and phrase structure parsing, which examines the constituent structure and sub-categorization features of the sentence. A technique is described based on DCG parsing in PROLOG that attempts to consume the words of the sentence one at a time by rule: it is exemplified through simplified versions of its rules for parsing sentence type and the noun phrase, and through examples of its sub-categorization tests for properties of lexical entries. It is suggested that such a parser can form a useful component in many CALL activities.

Author: Vivian Cook