We argue for a performance-based design of natural language grammars and their associated parsers in order to meet the constraints posed by real-world natural language understanding. This approach incorporates declarative and procedural knowledge about language and language use within an object-oriented specification framework. We discuss several message passing protocols for real-world text parsing and provide reasons for sacrificing completeness of the parse in favor of efficiency.
@article{arxiv.cmp-lg/9605026,
title = {Trading off Completeness for Efficiency --- The \textsc{ParseTalk} Performance Grammar Approach to Real-World Text Parsing},
author = {Peter Neuhaus and Udo Hahn},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:cmp-lg/9605026},
year = {2008}
}