Context-Free Grammars and Constituency Parsing

Introduction

1. What does the word “syntax” come from, and what does it study?
   Greek sýntaxis, “setting out together, arrangement”: the way words are arranged together.
   • Jurafsky & Martin, Speech and Language Processing, 3rd ed. draft, ch. 19, Introduction, p. 425
2. What is syntactic parsing, and what are parse trees used for?
   Assigning a syntactic structure to a sentence. Uses: grammar checking (unparsable sentences may be ungrammatical), an intermediate representation for semantic analysis, and text analysis in data-science applications that model relations between sentence elements.
   • Jurafsky & Martin, Speech and Language Processing, 3rd ed. draft, ch. 19, Introduction, p. 425