Highly constrained unification grammars

Daniel Feinstein; Shuly Wintner

doi:10.3115/1220175.1220312

Highly constrained unification grammars

Daniel Feinstein, Shuly Wintner

Department of Computer Science

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution › peer-review

Abstract

Unification grammars are widely accepted as an expressive means for describing the structure of natural languages. In general, the recognition problem is undecidable for unification grammars. Even with restricted variants of the formalism, offline parsable grammars, the problem is computationally hard. We present two natural constraints on unification grammars which limit their expressivity. We first show that non-reentrant unification grammars generate exactly the class of contextfree languages. We then relax the constraint and show that one-reentrant unification grammars generate exactly the class of tree-adjoining languages. We thus relate the commonly used and linguistically motivated formalism of unification grammars to more restricted, computationally tractable classes of languages.

Original language	English
Title of host publication	COLING/ACL 2006 - 21st International Conference on Computational Linguistics and 44th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Proceedings of the Conference
Publisher	Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
Pages	1089-1096
Number of pages	8
ISBN (Print)	1932432655, 9781932432657
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.3115/1220175.1220312
State	Published - 2006
Event	21st International Conference on Computational Linguistics and 44th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, COLING/ACL 2006 - Sydney, NSW, Australia Duration: 17 Jul 2006 → 21 Jul 2006

Publication series

Name	COLING/ACL 2006 - 21st International Conference on Computational Linguistics and 44th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Proceedings of the Conference
Volume	1

Conference

Conference	21st International Conference on Computational Linguistics and 44th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, COLING/ACL 2006
Country/Territory	Australia
City	Sydney, NSW
Period	17/07/06 → 21/07/06

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their comments and Soricut et al. [13], Jindal et al. [5], and Fei et al.[3] for making their resources available. This work was financially supported by NSERC.

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Language and Linguistics
Linguistics and Language

Access to Document

10.3115/1220175.1220312

Cite this

Feinstein, D., & Wintner, S. (2006). Highly constrained unification grammars. In COLING/ACL 2006 - 21st International Conference on Computational Linguistics and 44th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Proceedings of the Conference (pp. 1089-1096). (COLING/ACL 2006 - 21st International Conference on Computational Linguistics and 44th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Proceedings of the Conference; Vol. 1). Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL). https://doi.org/10.3115/1220175.1220312

Feinstein, Daniel ; Wintner, Shuly. / Highly constrained unification grammars. COLING/ACL 2006 - 21st International Conference on Computational Linguistics and 44th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Proceedings of the Conference. Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2006. pp. 1089-1096 (COLING/ACL 2006 - 21st International Conference on Computational Linguistics and 44th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Proceedings of the Conference).

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title = "Highly constrained unification grammars",

abstract = "Unification grammars are widely accepted as an expressive means for describing the structure of natural languages. In general, the recognition problem is undecidable for unification grammars. Even with restricted variants of the formalism, offline parsable grammars, the problem is computationally hard. We present two natural constraints on unification grammars which limit their expressivity. We first show that non-reentrant unification grammars generate exactly the class of contextfree languages. We then relax the constraint and show that one-reentrant unification grammars generate exactly the class of tree-adjoining languages. We thus relate the commonly used and linguistically motivated formalism of unification grammars to more restricted, computationally tractable classes of languages.",

author = "Daniel Feinstein and Shuly Wintner",

note = "Funding Information: The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their comments and Soricut et al. [13], Jindal et al. [5], and Fei et al.[3] for making their resources available. This work was financially supported by NSERC.; 21st International Conference on Computational Linguistics and 44th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, COLING/ACL 2006 ; Conference date: 17-07-2006 Through 21-07-2006",

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doi = "10.3115/1220175.1220312",

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series = "COLING/ACL 2006 - 21st International Conference on Computational Linguistics and 44th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Proceedings of the Conference",

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Feinstein, D & Wintner, S 2006, Highly constrained unification grammars. in COLING/ACL 2006 - 21st International Conference on Computational Linguistics and 44th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Proceedings of the Conference. COLING/ACL 2006 - 21st International Conference on Computational Linguistics and 44th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Proceedings of the Conference, vol. 1, Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), pp. 1089-1096, 21st International Conference on Computational Linguistics and 44th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, COLING/ACL 2006, Sydney, NSW, Australia, 17/07/06. https://doi.org/10.3115/1220175.1220312

Highly constrained unification grammars. / Feinstein, Daniel; Wintner, Shuly.
COLING/ACL 2006 - 21st International Conference on Computational Linguistics and 44th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Proceedings of the Conference. Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2006. p. 1089-1096 (COLING/ACL 2006 - 21st International Conference on Computational Linguistics and 44th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Proceedings of the Conference; Vol. 1).

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution › peer-review

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Feinstein D, Wintner S. Highly constrained unification grammars. In COLING/ACL 2006 - 21st International Conference on Computational Linguistics and 44th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Proceedings of the Conference. Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL). 2006. p. 1089-1096. (COLING/ACL 2006 - 21st International Conference on Computational Linguistics and 44th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Proceedings of the Conference). doi: 10.3115/1220175.1220312

Highly constrained unification grammars

Abstract

Publication series

Conference

Bibliographical note

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Access to Document

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