Topic
Formal language
About: Formal language is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 5763 publications have been published within this topic receiving 154114 citations.
Papers published on a yearly basis
Papers
More filters
TL;DR: An informal discussion of the metalanguage based on the example of a complete translator for a small language is presented and a semantic metalanguage has been developed for representing the meanings of statements in a large class of computer languages.
Abstract: e l y g e r m a n dissemine puters. t h e publics well t r y) adopt net r to be o:. f o r m e d i n t c o m p o s i t i o : b e u s e d t,. t y p e s e t t i n g r o c e s s c o u l i h a s a u t h o ~ a t e ~ t i d e n t in d r e t r i e v e [ t a n s w e r t(b e f o r e t h e s e f a s h i o n , i: tndle m a n n-T h e follow. A semantic metalanguage has been developed for representing the meanings of statements in a large class of computer languages. This metalanguage has been the basis for construction of an efficient, functioning compiler-compiler. An informal discussion of the metalanguage based on the example of a complete translator for a small language is presented. One of the most significant developments in the study of computer languages has been the formalization of syntax. Besides greatly improving communications between people, formalized syntax has led to new results in the theory and practice of programming. As early as 1960, Irons [7] was able to construct a compiler whose syntax phase was independent of the source language being trans-late& This work and that of other early contributors such as Brooker and 5Iorris [1] led to speculation that the entire compilation process could be automated. The problem was to develop a single program which could act as a translator for a large class of languages differing from each other in substantial ways. To solve this so-called compiler-compiler problem, one must find appropriate formalizations of the syntax and semantics of computer languages. The formalization of semantics for some language, L, will involve representing the meanings of statements in L in terms of an appropriate mete-language. The meanings of statements in the mete-language are assumed to be known (primitive). If L is a computer language, the semantics of L nmst involve a description of its translator. One example of a semantic mete-language is the order code of a computer. An order code or assembly language can certainly describe any translation …
80 citations
21 Apr 1993
TL;DR: It is proved that it is not possible to create for every DOP-model a strongly equivalent stochastic CFG which also assigns the same probabilities to the parses, and it is shown that the maximum probability parse can be estimated in polynomial time by applying Monte Carlo techniques.
Abstract: In Data Oriented Parsing (DOP), an annotated corpus is used as a stochastic grammar. An input string is parsed by combining subtrees from the corpus. As a consequence, one parse tree can usually be generated by several derivations that involve different subtrees. This leads to a statistics where the probability of a parse is equal to the sum of the probabilities of all its derivations. In (Scha, 1990) an informal introduction to DOP is given, while (Bod, 1992a) provides a formalization of the theory. In this paper we compare DOP with other stochastic grammars in the context of Formal Language Theory. It it proved that it is not possible to create for every DOP-model a strongly equivalent stochastic CFG which also assigns the same probabilities to the parses. We show that the maximum probability parse can be estimated in polynomial time by applying Monte Carlo techniques. The model was tested on a set of hand-parsed strings from the Air Travel Information System (ATIS) spoken language corpus. Preliminary experiments yield 96% test set parsing accuracy.
80 citations
01 Dec 1982
TL;DR: A discrete event process is defined in algebraic terms and its behavior is given by an appropriate formal language.
Abstract: A discrete event process is defined in algebraic terms and its behavior is given by an appropriate formal language.
80 citations
08 Apr 2005
TL;DR: In this article, the LISA compiler is used to generate editors, inspectors, debuggers, and visualisers/animators from formal language specifications, which can be described by a generic fixed part that traverses the appropriate data structures generated by a specific variable part.
Abstract: Many tools have been constructed using different formal methods to process various parts of a language specification (e.g. scanner generators, parser generators and compiler generators). The automatic generation of a complete compiler was the primary goal of such systems, but researchers recognised the possibility that many other language-based tools could be generated from formal language specifications. Such tools can be generated automatically whenever they can be described by a generic fixed part that traverses the appropriate data structures generated by a specific variable part, which can be systematically derivable from the language specifications. The paper identifies generic and specific parts for various language-based tools. Several language-based tools are presented in the paper, which are automatically generated using an attribute grammar-based compiler generator called LISA. The generated tools that are described in the paper include editors, inspectors, debuggers and visualisers/animators. Because of their complexity of construction, special emphasis is given to visualisers/animators, and the unique contribution of our approach toward generating such tools.
79 citations
TL;DR: It is shown that it is decidable whether an infinité word gênerated by iterated morphism is ultimately periodic or not.
Abstract: — We show that it is decidable whether an infinité word gênerated by iterated morphism is ultimately periodic or not. Résumé. — Nous montrons qu'on peut décider si un mot infini engendré par morphisme itéré est uitimement périodique.
79 citations