@inproceedings{wall-wittenburg-1989-predictive,
    title = "Predictive Normal Forms for Composition in Categorical Grammars",
    author = "Wall, Robert E.  and
      Wittenburg, Kent",
    editor = "Tomita, Masaru",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Parsing Technologies",
    month = aug,
    year = "1989",
    address = "Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA",
    publisher = "Carnegy Mellon University",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/add-emnlp-2024-awards/W89-0216/",
    pages = "152--161",
    abstract = "Extensions to Categorial Grammars proposed to account for nonconstitutent conjunction and long-distance dependencies introduce the problem of equivalent derivations, an issue we have characterized as spurious ambiguity from the parsing perspective. In Wittenburg (1987) a proposal was made for compiling Categorial Grammars into predictive forms in order to solve the spurious ambiguity problem. This paper investigates formal properties o f grammars that use predictive versions of function composition. Among our results are (1) that grammars with predictive composition are in general equivalent to the originals if and only if a restriction on predictive rules is applied, (2) that modulo this restriction, the predictive grammars have indeed eliminated the problem of spurious ambiguity, and (3) that the issue o f equivalence is decidable, i.e., for any particular grammar, whether one needs to apply the restriction or not to ensure equivalence is a decidable question."
}