Abstract

In this paper, we present a method which may speed up Earley parsers in practice. A first pass called a guiding parser builds an intermediate structure called a guide which is used by a second pass, an Earley parser, called a guided parser whose Predictor phase is slightly modified in such a way that it selects an initial item only if this item is in the guide. This approach is validated by practical experiments preformed on a large test set with an English context-free grammar.