Efficient Normal-Form Parsing for Combinatory Categorial Grammar

Under categorial grammars that have powerful rules like composition, a simple n-word sentence can have exponentially many parses. Generating all parses is inefficient and obscures whatever true semantic ambiguities are in the input. This paper addresses the problem for a fairly general form of Combinatory Categorial Grammar, by means of an efficient, correct, and easy to implement normal-form parsing technique. The parser is proved to find exactly one parse in each semantic equivalence class of allowable parses; that is, spurious ambiguity (as carefully defined) is shown to be both safely and completely eliminated.Comment: 8 pages, LaTeX packaged with three .sty files, also uses cgloss4e.st

Controlled Rewriting Using Productions and Reductions

We investigate context-free grammars the rules of which can be used in a productive and in a reductive fashion, while the application of these rules is controlled by a regular language. We distinguish several modes of derivation for this kind of grammar. The resulting language families (properly) extend the family of context-free languages. We establish some closure properties of these language families and some grammatical transformations which yield a few normal forms for this type of grammar. Finally, we consider some special cases (viz. the context-free grammar is linear or left-linear), and generalizations, in particular, the use of arbitrary rather than regular control languages

Structure preserving transformations on non-left-recursive grammars

We will be concerned with grammar covers, The first part of this paper presents a general framework for covers. The second part introduces a transformation from nonleft-recursive grammars to grammars in Greibach normal form. An investigation of the structure preserving properties of this transformation, which serves also as an illustration of our framework for covers, is presented

An Abstract Machine for Unification Grammars

This work describes the design and implementation of an abstract machine, Amalia, for the linguistic formalism ALE, which is based on typed feature structures. This formalism is one of the most widely accepted in computational linguistics and has been used for designing grammars in various linguistic theories, most notably HPSG. Amalia is composed of data structures and a set of instructions, augmented by a compiler from the grammatical formalism to the abstract instructions, and a (portable) interpreter of the abstract instructions. The effect of each instruction is defined using a low-level language that can be executed on ordinary hardware. The advantages of the abstract machine approach are twofold. From a theoretical point of view, the abstract machine gives a well-defined operational semantics to the grammatical formalism. This ensures that grammars specified using our system are endowed with well defined meaning. It enables, for example, to formally verify the correctness of a compiler for HPSG, given an independent definition. From a practical point of view, Amalia is the first system that employs a direct compilation scheme for unification grammars that are based on typed feature structures. The use of amalia results in a much improved performance over existing systems. In order to test the machine on a realistic application, we have developed a small-scale, HPSG-based grammar for a fragment of the Hebrew language, using Amalia as the development platform. This is the first application of HPSG to a Semitic language.Comment: Doctoral Thesis, 96 pages, many postscript figures, uses pstricks, pst-node, psfig, fullname and a macros fil

Implicit learning of recursive context-free grammars

Context-free grammars are fundamental for the description of linguistic syntax. However, most artificial grammar learning experiments have explored learning of simpler finite-state grammars, while studies exploring context-free grammars have not assessed awareness and implicitness. This paper explores the implicit learning of context-free grammars employing features of hierarchical organization, recursive embedding and long-distance dependencies. The grammars also featured the distinction between left- and right-branching structures, as well as between centre- and tail-embedding, both distinctions found in natural languages. People acquired unconscious knowledge of relations between grammatical classes even for dependencies over long distances, in ways that went beyond learning simpler relations (e.g. n-grams) between individual words. The structural distinctions drawn from linguistics also proved important as performance was greater for tail-embedding than centre-embedding structures. The results suggest the plausibility of implicit learning of complex context-free structures, which model some features of natural languages. They support the relevance of artificial grammar learning for probing mechanisms of language learning and challenge existing theories and computational models of implicit learning

Controlled Bidirectional Grammars

We investigate context-free grammars the rules of which can be used in a productive and in a reductive fashion, while the application of these rules is controlled by a regular language. We distinguish several modes of derivation for this kind of grammar. The resulting language families (properly) extend the family of context-free languages. We establish some closure properties of these language families and some grammatical transformations which yield a few normal forms for this type of grammar. Finally, we consider some special cases (viz. the context-free grammar is linear or left-linear), and generalizations, in particular, the use of arbitrary rather than regular control languages

Comparing and evaluating extended Lambek calculi

Lambeks Syntactic Calculus, commonly referred to as the Lambek calculus, was innovative in many ways, notably as a precursor of linear logic. But it also showed that we could treat our grammatical framework as a logic (as opposed to a logical theory). However, though it was successful in giving at least a basic treatment of many linguistic phenomena, it was also clear that a slightly more expressive logical calculus was needed for many other cases. Therefore, many extensions and variants of the Lambek calculus have been proposed, since the eighties and up until the present day. As a result, there is now a large class of calculi, each with its own empirical successes and theoretical results, but also each with its own logical primitives. This raises the question: how do we compare and evaluate these different logical formalisms? To answer this question, I present two unifying frameworks for these extended Lambek calculi. Both are proof net calculi with graph contraction criteria. The first calculus is a very general system: you specify the structure of your sequents and it gives you the connectives and contractions which correspond to it. The calculus can be extended with structural rules, which translate directly into graph rewrite rules. The second calculus is first-order (multiplicative intuitionistic) linear logic, which turns out to have several other, independently proposed extensions of the Lambek calculus as fragments. I will illustrate the use of each calculus in building bridges between analyses proposed in different frameworks, in highlighting differences and in helping to identify problems.Comment: Empirical advances in categorial grammars, Aug 2015, Barcelona, Spain. 201