Graph Interpolation Grammars are a declarative formalism with an operational
semantics. Their goal is to emulate salient features of the human parser, and
notably incrementality. The parsing process defined by GIGs incrementally
builds a syntactic representation of a sentence as each successive lexeme is
read. A GIG rule specifies a set of parse configurations that trigger its
application and an operation to perform on a matching configuration. Rules are
partly context-sensitive; furthermore, they are reversible, meaning that their
operations can be undone, which allows the parsing process to be
nondeterministic. These two factors confer enough expressive power to the
formalism for parsing natural languages.Comment: 41 pages, Postscript onl