Interaction Grammars

Interaction Grammar (IG) is a grammatical formalism based on the notion of polarity. Polarities express the resource sensitivity of natural languages by modelling the distinction between saturated and unsaturated syntactic structures. Syntactic composition is represented as a chemical reaction guided by the saturation of polarities. It is expressed in a model-theoretic framework where grammars are constraint systems using the notion of tree description and parsing appears as a process of building tree description models satisfying criteria of saturation and minimality

The Tree-Generative Capacity of Combinatory Categorial Grammars

The generative capacity of combinatory categorial grammars as acceptors of tree languages is investigated. It is demonstrated that the such obtained tree languages can also be generated by simple monadic context-free tree grammars. However, the subclass of pure combinatory categorial grammars cannot even accept all regular tree languages. Additionally, the tree languages accepted by combinatory categorial grammars with limited rule degrees are characterized: If only application rules are allowed, then they can accept only a proper subset of the regular tree languages, whereas they can accept exactly the regular tree languages once first degree composition rules are permitted

Grammatical inference by specialization as a state splitting strategy

International audienceWe exhibit connexions beteween two already known learning algorithms developped in different backgrounds. This allows to show that learning classical (or AB) categorial grammars by specialization can be identified with a “state splitting” strategy, in a search space made of extended automata. It also leads to a new interpretation of why it is possible to learn categorial grammars from semantically typed (in Montague's sense) examples

Identification of biRFSA languages

International audienceThe task of identifying a language from a set of its words is not an easy one. For instance, it is not feasible to identify regular languages in the general case. Therefore, looking for subclasses of regular languages that can be identi?ed in this framework is an interesting problem. One of the most classical identi?able classes is the class of reversible languages, introduced by D. Angluin, also called bideterministic languages as they can be represented by deterministic automata (DFA) whose reverse is also deterministic. Residual Finite State Automata (RFSA) on the other hand is a class of non deterministic automata that shares some properties with DFA. In particular, DFA are RFSA and RFSA can be much smaller. We study here learnability of the class of languages that can be represented by biRFSA: RFSA whose reverse are RFSA. We prove that this class is not identi?able in general but we present two subclasses that are learnable, the second one being identi?able in polynomial time

On Pregroups, Freedom, and (Virtual) Conceptual Necessity

Pregroups were introduced in (Lambek, 1999), and provide a founda-tion for a particularly simple syntactic calculus. Buszkowski (2001) showed that free pregroup grammars generate exactly the -free context-free lan-guages. Here we characterize the class of languages generable by all pre-groups, which will be shown to be the entire class of recursively enumerable languages. To show this result, we rely on the well-known representation of recursively enumerable languages as the homomorphic image of the inter-section of two context-free languages (Ginsburg et al., 1967). We define an operation of cross-product over grammars (so-called because of its behaviour on the types), and show that the cross-product of any two free-pregroup grammars generates exactly the intersection of their respective languages. The representation theorem applies once we show that allowing ‘empty cat-egories ’ (i.e. lexical items without overt phonological content) allows us to mimic the effects of any string homomorphism.

Multiple Context-Free Tree Grammars: Lexicalization and Characterization

Multiple (simple) context-free tree grammars are investigated, where "simple" means "linear and nondeleting". Every multiple context-free tree grammar that is finitely ambiguous can be lexicalized; i.e., it can be transformed into an equivalent one (generating the same tree language) in which each rule of the grammar contains a lexical symbol. Due to this transformation, the rank of the nonterminals increases at most by 1, and the multiplicity (or fan-out) of the grammar increases at most by the maximal rank of the lexical symbols; in particular, the multiplicity does not increase when all lexical symbols have rank 0. Multiple context-free tree grammars have the same tree generating power as multi-component tree adjoining grammars (provided the latter can use a root-marker). Moreover, every multi-component tree adjoining grammar that is finitely ambiguous can be lexicalized. Multiple context-free tree grammars have the same string generating power as multiple context-free (string) grammars and polynomial time parsing algorithms. A tree language can be generated by a multiple context-free tree grammar if and only if it is the image of a regular tree language under a deterministic finite-copying macro tree transducer. Multiple context-free tree grammars can be used as a synchronous translation device.Comment: 78 pages, 13 figure