1996/04/30 by James Rogers, Rogers, James · 1 citation
Computer Science · #Computation and Language (cs.CL) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Logic, programming, and type systems #Natural Language Processing Techniques #cmp-lg #cs.CL #semigroups and automata theory
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.cmp-lg/9604023
To appear in Proceedings of the 34th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics. Uses aclap.sty. 7 Pages
arxiv created 1996/04/30 · openalex publication_date 1996/04/30 · arxiv updated 2009/11/30 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
A natural next step in the evolution of constraint-based grammar formalisms from rewriting formalisms is to abstract fully away from the details of the grammar mechanism---to express syntactic theories purely in terms of the properties of the class of structures they license. By focusing on the structural properties of languages rather than on mechanisms for generating or checking structures that exhibit those properties, this model-theoretic approach can offer simpler and significantly clearer expression of theories and can potentially provide a uniform formalization, allowing disparate theories to be compared on the basis of those properties. We discuss \LKP, a monadic second-order logical framework for such an approach to syntax that has the distinctive virtue of being superficially expressive---supporting direct statement of most linguistically significant syntactic properties---but having well-defined strong generative capacity---languages are definable in \LKP iff they are strongly context-free. We draw examples from the realms of GPSG and GB.