31,760 research outputs found

    Attribute Grammars: a Declarative Functional Language

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    Projet CHARMEAlthough Attribute Grammars were introduced thirty years ago, their lack of expressiveness has resulted in limited use outside the domain of static language processing. In this paper we show that it is possible to extend this expressiveness. We claim that Attribute Grammars can be used to describe computations on structures that are not just trees, but also on abstractions allowing for infinite structures. To gain this expressiveness, we introduce two new notions: {\em scheme productions\/} and {\em conditional productions}. The result is a language that is comparable in power to most first-order functional languages, with a distinctive declarative character. Our extensions deal with a different part of the Attribute Grammars formalism than what is used in most works on Attribute Grammars including global analysis and evaluator generation. Hence, most existing results are directly applicable to our extended Attribute Grammars including efficient implementation (in our case, using the FNC-2 system http://www-rocq.inria.fr/charme/FNC-2/). The major contribution of this approach is to restore and re-emphasize the intrinsic power of Attribute Grammars. Furthermore, our extensions call for new studies on applying to functional programming the analysis and implementation techniques developed for Attribute Grammars

    Amalia -- A Unified Platform for Parsing and Generation

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    Contemporary linguistic theories (in particular, HPSG) are declarative in nature: they specify constraints on permissible structures, not how such structures are to be computed. Grammars designed under such theories are, therefore, suitable for both parsing and generation. However, practical implementations of such theories don't usually support bidirectional processing of grammars. We present a grammar development system that includes a compiler of grammars (for parsing and generation) to abstract machine instructions, and an interpreter for the abstract machine language. The generation compiler inverts input grammars (designed for parsing) to a form more suitable for generation. The compiled grammars are then executed by the interpreter using one control strategy, regardless of whether the grammar is the original or the inverted version. We thus obtain a unified, efficient platform for developing reversible grammars.Comment: 8 pages postscrip
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