Routledge Dictionary of Language and Linguistics
In parsing, a schematic way to show, economically and without redundancy, the syntactic representations of all possible well-formed substrings of a sentence. Since sentences of natural language frequently contain structurally ambiguous strings of words, as well as clearly definable constituents, it is often not possible to decide which of the possible structures of a string of words are appropriate for interpretation (
ambiguity). In order not to recompute all the parts of each new analysis (i.e. backtrack) in ambiguous structures, all pieces of accumulated knowledge are put into the chart, where they can be consulted as often as necessary and in any possible combination. One can picture a chart simply as a collection of all the possible tree diagrams of all the substrings of a sentence, in which the same parts of different tree diagrams are always represented only once.
References
Kaplan, R. 1970.The mind system. A grammar rule language. Santa Monica, CA.
Kay, M.
1967. Experiments with a powerful parser. AJCL. Microfiche 43.
——1980. Algorithmic schemata and data structures in syntactic processing. Stockholm.
Varile, G.B. 1983. Charts: a data structure for parsing. In M.King (ed.), Parsing natural language. London. 73–87.
( also computational linguistics)
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