Top-down tree transducers with regular look-ahead

Top-down tree transducers with regular look-ahead are introduced. It is shown how these can be decomposed and composed, and how this leads to closure properties of surface sets and tree transformation languages. Particular attention is paid to deterministic tree transducers

Practical experiments with regular approximation of context-free languages

Several methods are discussed that construct a finite automaton given a context-free grammar, including both methods that lead to subsets and those that lead to supersets of the original context-free language. Some of these methods of regular approximation are new, and some others are presented here in a more refined form with respect to existing literature. Practical experiments with the different methods of regular approximation are performed for spoken-language input: hypotheses from a speech recognizer are filtered through a finite automaton.Comment: 28 pages. To appear in Computational Linguistics 26(1), March 200

A Drop-in Replacement for LR(1) Table-Driven Parsing

This paper presents a construction method for a deterministic one-symbol look-ahead LR parser which allows non-terminals in the parser look-ahead. This effectively relaxes the requirement of parsing the reverse of the right-most derivation of a string/sentence. This is achieved by replacing the deterministic push down automata of LR parsing by a two-stack automata. The class of grammars accepted by the two-stack parser properly contains the LR(k) grammars. Since the modification to the table-driven LR parsing process is relatively minor and mostly impacts the creation of the goto and action tables, a parser modified to adopt the two-stack process should be comparable in size and performance to LR parsers.</p