Miyazaki Laboratory in Niigata University has been working for several years on the development of a new type of syntactic parser for Japanese and English : POWER. It is an object-oriented parser written in PROLOG.
The basic units that the program is working with are objects, that are made of a word together with a class (e.g. noun) and a category (e.g. subject). Depending on their attributes, objects send messages to other objects, which carry out different actions and answer. Verbs will, for instance, send messages to subjects and wait for answers.
POWER deals with Japanese sentences that have already been morphologically parsed, using JUMAN for instance. Structure trees are sorted by costs that are linked with their probability of being the correct structure of the sentence. One advantage of POWER is its flexibility with respect to the formalism used and the actions that the objects have to carry out.