Artificial neural networks (ANNs), due to their inherent parallelism and potential fault tolerance, offer an attractive paradigm for robust and efficient implementations of syntax analyzers. This paper proposes a modular neural network architecture for syntax analysis on continuous input stream of characters. The components of the proposed architecture include neural network designs for a stack, a lexical analyzer, a grammar parser and a parse tree construction module. The proposed NN stack allows simulation of a stack of large depth, needs no training, and hence is not application-specific. The proposed NN lexical analyzer provides a relatively efficient and high performance alternative to current computer systems for lexical analysis especially in natural language processing applications. The proposed NN parser generates parse trees by parsing strings from widely used subsets of deterministic context-free languages (generated by LR grammars). The estimated performance of the proposed neural network architecture (based on current CMOS VLSI technology) for syntax analysis is compared with that of commonly used approaches to syntax analysis in current computer systems. The results of this performance comparison suggest that the proposed neural network architecture offers an attractive approach for syntax analysis in a wide range of practical applications such as programming language compilation and natural language processing
