Compact non-left-recursive grammars using the selective left-corner transform and factoring

  • Authors:
  • Mark Johnson;Brian Roark

  • Affiliations:
  • Brown University;Brown University

  • Venue:
  • COLING '00 Proceedings of the 18th conference on Computational linguistics - Volume 1
  • Year:
  • 2000

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Abstract

The left-corner transform removes left-recursion from (probabilistic) context-free grammars and unification grammars, permitting simple top-down parsing techniques to be used. Unfortunately the grammars produced by the standard left-corner transform are usually much larger than the original. The selective left-corner transform described in this paper produces a transformed grammar which simulates left-corner recognition of a user-specified set of the original productions, and top-down recognition of the others. Combined with two factorizations, it produces non-left-recursive grammars that are not much larger than the original.