35,637 research outputs found
Phrase structure grammars as indicative of uniquely human thoughts
I argue that the ability to compute phrase structure grammars is indicative of a particular kind of thought. This type of thought that is only available to cognitive systems that have access to the computations that allow the generation and interpretation of the structural descriptions of phrase structure grammars. The study of phrase structure grammars, and formal language theory in general, is thus indispensable to studies of human cognition, for it makes explicit both the unique type of human thought and the underlying mechanisms in virtue of which this thought is made possible
Recovering Grammar Relationships for the Java Language Specification
Grammar convergence is a method that helps discovering relationships between
different grammars of the same language or different language versions. The key
element of the method is the operational, transformation-based representation
of those relationships. Given input grammars for convergence, they are
transformed until they are structurally equal. The transformations are composed
from primitive operators; properties of these operators and the composed chains
provide quantitative and qualitative insight into the relationships between the
grammars at hand. We describe a refined method for grammar convergence, and we
use it in a major study, where we recover the relationships between all the
grammars that occur in the different versions of the Java Language
Specification (JLS). The relationships are represented as grammar
transformation chains that capture all accidental or intended differences
between the JLS grammars. This method is mechanized and driven by nominal and
structural differences between pairs of grammars that are subject to
asymmetric, binary convergence steps. We present the underlying operator suite
for grammar transformation in detail, and we illustrate the suite with many
examples of transformations on the JLS grammars. We also describe the
extraction effort, which was needed to make the JLS grammars amenable to
automated processing. We include substantial metadata about the convergence
process for the JLS so that the effort becomes reproducible and transparent
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
Probabilistic regular graphs
Deterministic graph grammars generate regular graphs, that form a structural
extension of configuration graphs of pushdown systems. In this paper, we study
a probabilistic extension of regular graphs obtained by labelling the terminal
arcs of the graph grammars by probabilities. Stochastic properties of these
graphs are expressed using PCTL, a probabilistic extension of computation tree
logic. We present here an algorithm to perform approximate verification of PCTL
formulae. Moreover, we prove that the exact model-checking problem for PCTL on
probabilistic regular graphs is undecidable, unless restricting to qualitative
properties. Our results generalise those of EKM06, on probabilistic pushdown
automata, using similar methods combined with graph grammars techniques.Comment: In Proceedings INFINITY 2010, arXiv:1010.611
Learning cover context-free grammars from structural data
We consider the problem of learning an unknown context-free grammar when the
only knowledge available and of interest to the learner is about its structural
descriptions with depth at most The goal is to learn a cover
context-free grammar (CCFG) with respect to , that is, a CFG whose
structural descriptions with depth at most agree with those of the
unknown CFG. We propose an algorithm, called , that efficiently learns
a CCFG using two types of queries: structural equivalence and structural
membership. We show that runs in time polynomial in the number of
states of a minimal deterministic finite cover tree automaton (DCTA) with
respect to . This number is often much smaller than the number of states
of a minimum deterministic finite tree automaton for the structural
descriptions of the unknown grammar
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