Complexity, Parsing, and Factorization of Tree-Local Multi-Component Tree-Adjoining Grammar

Tree-Local Multi-Component Tree-Adjoining Grammar (TL-MCTAG) is an appealing formalism for natural language representation because it arguably allows the encapsulation of the appropriate domain of locality within its elementary structures. Its multicomponent structure allows modeling of lexical items that may ultimately have elements far apart in a sentence, such as quantifiers and Wh-words. When used as the base formalism for a synchronous grammar, its flexibility allows it to express both the close relationships and the divergent structure necessary to capture the links between the syntax and semantics of a single language or the syntax of two different languages. Its limited expressivity provides constraints on movement and, we posit, may have generated additional popularity based on a misconception about its parsing complexity. Although TL-MCTAG was shown to be equivalent in expressivity to TAG when it was first introduced (Weir 1988), the complexity of TL-MCTAG is still not well-understood. This paper offers a thorough examination of the problem of TL-MCTAG recognition, showing that even highly restricted forms of TL-MCTAG are NP-complete to recognize. However, in spite of the provable difficulty of the recognition problem, we offer several algorithms that can substantially improve processing efficiency. First, we present a parsing algorithm that improves on the baseline parsing method and runs in polynomial time when both the fan-out and rank of the input grammar are bounded. Second, we offer an optimal, efficient algorithm for factorizing a grammar to produce a strongly-equivalent TL-MCTAG grammar with the rank of the grammar minimized.Engineering and Applied Science

Optimal k-arization of Synchronous Tree-Adjoining Grammar

Synchronous Tree-Adjoining Grammar (STAG) is a promising formalism for syntaxaware machine translation and simultaneous computation of natural-language syntax and semantics. Current research in both of these areas is actively pursuing its incorporation. However, STAG parsing is known to be NP-hard due to the potential for intertwined correspondences between the linked nonterminal symbols in the elementary structures. Given a particular grammar, the polynomial degree of efficient STAG parsing algorithms depends directly on the rank of the grammar: the maximum number of correspondences that appear within a single elementary structure. In this paper we present a compile-time algorithm for transforming a STAG into a strongly-equivalent STAG that optimally minimizes the rank, k, across the grammar. The algorithm performs in O(|G| + |Y| · L 3 G) time where LG is the maximum number of links in any single synchronous tree pair in the grammar and Y is the set of synchronous tree pairs of G