Related papers: Yacc is dead
This report is mostly written for educational purposes. It is meant as a self contained introduction to regular languages, regular expressions, and regular expression matching by using Brzozowski derivatives. As such it is mostly based on…
To Rogers (1994) we owe the insight that monadic second order predicate logic with multiple successors (MSO) is well suited in many respects as a realistic formal base for syntactic theorizing. However, the agreeable formal properties of…
Synchronous Context-Free Grammars (SCFGs), also known as syntax-directed translation schemata, are unlike context-free grammars in that they do not have a binary normal form. In general, parsing with SCFGs takes space and time polynomial in…
We present new results on the relation between purely symbolic context-free parsing strategies and their probabilistic counter-parts. Such parsing strategies are seen as constructions of push-down devices from grammars. We show that…
We consider the task of learning a context-dependent mapping from utterances to denotations. With only denotations at training time, we must search over a combinatorially large space of logical forms, which is even larger with…
Prefix parsing asks whether an input prefix can be extended to a complete string generated by a given grammar. In the weighted setting, it also provides prefix probabilities, which are central to context-free language modeling,…
We continue our study of ordered context-free grammars, a grammar formalism that places an order on the parse trees produced by the corresponding context-free grammar. In particular, we simplify our previous definition of a derivation of a…
In the following paper, we present a simple method for sampling trees with or without replacement from BCFLs. A BCFL is a context-free language (CFL) corresponding to an incomplete string with holes, which can be completed by valid…
Multiple (simple) context-free tree grammars are investigated, where "simple" means "linear and nondeleting". Every multiple context-free tree grammar that is finitely ambiguous can be lexicalized; i.e., it can be transformed into an…
We propose a novel dependency-based hybrid tree model for semantic parsing, which converts natural language utterance into machine interpretable meaning representations. Unlike previous state-of-the-art models, the semantic information is…
Most scripting languages nowadays use regex pattern-matching libraries. These regex libraries borrow the syntax of regular expressions, but have an informal semantics that is different from the semantics of regular expressions, removing the…
As it has been unveiled that pre-trained language models (PLMs) are to some extent capable of recognizing syntactic concepts in natural language, much effort has been made to develop a method for extracting complete (binary) parses from…
In this paper we prove several results on normal forms for linear displacement context-free grammars. The results themselves are rather simple and use well-known techniques, but they are extensively used in more complex constructions.…
We describe a simple but effective method for cross-lingual syntactic transfer of dependency parsers, in the scenario where a large amount of translation data is not available. The method makes use of three steps: 1) a method for deriving…
We propose a scalable framework for deciding, proving, and explaining (in-)equivalence of context-free grammars. We present an implementation of the framework and evaluate it on large data sets collected within educational support systems.…
In this paper we consider the problem of context-free grammars comparison from the analysis point of view. We show that the problem can be reduced to numerical solution of systems of nonlinear matrix equations. The approach presented here…
We present a method for approximating context-free languages with one-counter automata. This approximation allows the reconstruction of parse trees of the original grammar. We identify a decidable superset of regular languages whose…
We develop a formal grammatical system called a link grammar, show how English grammar can be encoded in such a system, and give algorithms for efficiently parsing with a link grammar. Although the expressive power of link grammars is…
Syntactic constituency parsing is a fundamental problem in natural language processing and has been the subject of intensive research and engineering for decades. As a result, the most accurate parsers are domain specific, complex, and…
Low-resource languages pose a challenge for machine translation with large language models (LLMs), which require large amounts of training data. One potential way to circumvent this data dependence is to rely on LLMs' ability to use…