From the Publisher:
This best-selling book, now in its fourth edition, provides a wide-ranging and in-depth discussion of programming language concepts. As in previous editions, the author describes fundamental concepts of programming languages by presenting design issues of the various language constructs, examining the design choices for these constructs in a few common languages, and critically comparing the design alternatives. The book covers the most widely used methods of syntax description and introduces the most common approaches to describing the semantics of programming languages. Discussions of implementation methods and issues are integrated throughout the book.

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Concepts of programming languages

Overgeneration is the main source of computational complexity in previous principle-based parsers. This paper presents a message passing algorithm for principle-based parsing that avoids the overgeneration problem. This algorithm has been implemented in C++ and successfully tested with example sentences from (van Riemsdijk and Williams, 1986).

Principle-based parsing without overgeneration

These Ecole polytechnique federale de Lausanne EPFL, n° 305 (1978) Reference doi:10.5075/epfl-thesis-305Print copy in library catalog Record created on 2005-03-16, modified on 2016-08-08

Syntactic pattern recognition

This dissertation presents a model of the human sentence interpretation process, which attempts to meet criteria of adequacy imposed by the different paradigms of sentence interpretation These include the need to produce a high-level interpretation, to embed a linguistically motivated grammar, and to be compatible with psycholinguistic results on sentence processing
The model includes a theory of grammar called Construction-Based Interpretive Grammar (CIG) and an interpreter which uses the grammar to build an interpretation for single sentences An implementation of the interpreter has been built called Sal
Sal is an on-line interpreter, reading words one at a time and updating a partial interpretation of the sentence after each constituent This constituent-by-constituent interpretation is more fine-grained and hence more on-line than most previous models Sal is strongly interactionist in using both bottom-up and top-down knowledge in an evidential manner to access a set of constructions to build interpretations It uses a coherence-based selection mechanism to choose among these candidate interpretations, and allows temporary limited parallelism to handle local ambiguities Sal's architecture is consistent with a large number of psycholinguistic results
The interpreter embodies a number of strong claims about sentence processing One claim is uniformity, with respect to both representation and process In the grammar, a single kind of knowledge structure, the grammatical construction, is used to represent lexical, syntactic, idiomatic, and semantic knowledge CIG thus does not distinguish between the lexicon, the idiom dictionary, the syntactic rule base, and the semantic rule base Uniformity in processing means that there is no distinction between the lexical analyzer, the parser, and the semantic interpreter Because these kinds of knowledge are represented uniformly, they can be accessed, integrated, and disambiguated by a single mechanism
A second claim the interpreter embodies is that sentence processing is fundamentally knowledge-intensive and expectation-based The representation and integration of constructions uses many diverse types of linguistic knowledge Similarly, the access of constructions is sensitive to top-down and bottom-up, syntactic and semantic knowledge, and the selection of constructions is based on coherence with grammatical knowledge and the interpretation

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An on-line computational model of human sentence interpretation: a theory of the representation and use of linguistic knowledge

We present the design and theory of a new parsing engine, YAKKER, capable of satisfying the many needs of modern programmers and modern data processing applications. In particular, our new parsing engine handles (1) full scannerless context-free grammars with (2) regular expressions as right-hand sides for defining nonterminals. YAKKER also includes (3) facilities for binding variables to intermediate parse results and (4) using such bindings within arbitrary constraints to control parsing. These facilities allow the kind of data-dependent parsing commonly needed in systems applications, particularly those that operate over binary data. In addition, (5) nonterminals may be parameterized by arbitrary values, which gives the system good modularity and abstraction properties in the presence of data-dependent parsing. Finally, (6) legacy parsing libraries,such as sophisticated libraries for dates and times, may be directly incorporated into parser specifications. We illustrate the importance and utility of this rich collection of features by presenting its use on examples ranging from difficult programming language grammars to web server logs to binary data specification. We also show that our grammars have important compositionality properties and explain why such properties areimportant in modern applications such as automatic grammar induction.In terms of technical contributions, we provide a traditional high-level semantics for our new grammar formalization and show how to compile grammars into non deterministic automata. These automata are stack-based, somewhat like conventional push-down automata,but are also equipped with environments to track data-dependent parsing state. We prove the correctness of our translation of data-dependent grammars into these new automata and then show how to implement the automata efficiently using a variation of Earley's parsing algorithm.

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Semantics and algorithms for data-dependent grammars

In Government-Binding (GB) theory, the chief empirical effect of the principle Move-α is the definition of coindexing relations between nodes in phrase structure trees. This situation is explained by the extreme generality of the base component and several substantive constraints on transformations. The constraints on transformations, in particular Emonds’ (1976) Structure Preserving Hypothesis, imply that the base may generate all S-structures of the core constructions of the language in question. The two conditions combine with a shift away from a grammatical model with both conditions on derivations, such as transformational rule ordering, and conditions on representations, such as the Subjacency condition on adjacent chain elements, to a grammatical model that favors representations.1 It follows that the principal function of Move-α in the grammar is not reordering or otherwise rewriting of an input phrase marker for the derivation of S-structure, but rather the above noted establishment of coindexing relations between the nodes in the output representation. The relations in question are trace-antecedent relations. This trend in the role of Move-α in the grammar has been noted in the literature, especially by Koster (1978), Chomsky (1982), and Barss (1983).

Empty Categories, Chain Binding, and Parsing

Attribute grammars are an elegant formalization of the augmented context-free grammars characteristic of most current natural language systems. This paper presents an extension of Earley's algorithm to Knuth's attribute grammars, considering the case of S-attributed grammars. For this case, we study the conditions on the underlying base grammar under which the extended algorithm may be guaranteed to terminate. Finite partitioning of attribute domains is proposed to guarantee the termination of the algorithm, without the need for any restrictions on the context-free base.

An extension of earley's algorithm for S-attributed grammars

Attribute and unification grammar are syntax-directed grammatical formalisms that bear an important resemblance to each other and, especially in the case of unification grammar, enjoy certain currency as tools for linguistic description. A systematic study and comparison of the two formalisms, however, has not been reported to date. This paper reviews and compares the two formalisms, both from the point of view of their notations and expressive capabilities, and from that of their underlying algebraic semantics. The key to the semantic comparison is an algebraic formulation of the semantics of unification and the algebraic semantics of attribute grammar developed by Chirica and Martin [6]. The main result is that, from the point of view of their definitions and semantics, attribute grammar is more general than unification grammar, since it rests on a richer semantic algebra. This greater generality has important implications regarding the expressive power of the formalism and the possibility of efficient computational implementations for it. Also regarding their semantics, it is revealed that attribute grammar, unlike unification grammar, does not restrict attribute values to their basic term interpretation. This is a double-edged sword which, on the one hand, makes attribute grammar expressive and computationally efficient and, on the other, makes it computationally difficult to implement, because of the so-called “attribute evaluation problem”. For unification grammar, the noted restriction on term interpretations is at the heart of the difficulties encountered in implementing such linguistically motivated extensions to the basic formalism as negation and disjunction. The conclusion of this study is that attribute grammar is a better suited and more highly developed grammatical formalism for the description of natural and artificial languages, due to its greater generality, expressive power and, also importantly, more efficient computational implementations.

Nelson Correa

Papers

Empty Categories, Chain Binding, and Parsing

An extension of earley's algorithm for S-attributed grammars

Attribute and unification grammar: A review and analysis of formalisms