Describing syntax with star-free regular expressions

  • Authors:
  • Anssi Yli-Jyrä

  • Affiliations:
  • Univ. of Helsinki, Finland

  • Venue:
  • EACL '03 Proceedings of the tenth conference on European chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics - Volume 1
  • Year:
  • 2003

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Abstract

Syntactic constraints in Koskenniemi's Finite-State Intersection Grammar (FSIG) are logically less complex than their formalism (Koskenniemi et al., 1992) would suggest: It turns out that although the constraints in Voutilainen's (1994) FSIG description of English make use of several extensions to regular expressions, the description as a whole reduces to a finite combination of union, complement and concatenation. This is an essential improvement to the descriptive complexity of ENGFSIG. The result opens a door for further analysis of logical properties and possible optimizations in the FSIG descriptions. The proof contains a new formula for compiling Koskenniemi's restriction operation without any marker symbols.