  We develop a formal grammatical system called a link grammar, show how
English grammar can be encoded in such a system, and give algorithms for
efficiently parsing with a link grammar. Although the expressive power of link
grammars is equivalent to that of context free grammars, encoding natural
language grammars appears to be much easier with the new system. We have
written a program for general link parsing and written a link grammar for the
English language. The performance of this preliminary system -- both in the
breadth of English phenomena that it captures and in the computational
resources used -- indicates that the approach may have practical uses as well
as linguistic significance. Our program is written in C and may be obtained
through the internet.
