Are very large context-free grammars tractable?

  • Authors:
  • Pierre Boullier;Benoît Sagot

  • Affiliations:
  • INRIA-Rocquencourt, Rocquencourt, Chesnay Cedex, France;INRIA-Rocquencourt, Rocquencourt, Chesnay Cedex, France

  • Venue:
  • IWPT '07 Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Parsing Technologies
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

In this paper, we present a method which, in practice, allows to use parsers for languages defined by very large context-free grammars (over a million symbol occurrences). The idea is to split the parsing process in two passes. A first pass computes a sub-grammar which is a specialized part of the large grammar selected by the input text and various filtering strategies. The second pass is a traditional parser which works with the sub-grammar and the input text. This approach is validated by practical experiments performed on a Earley-like parser running on a test set with two large context-free grammars.