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.- Anthology ID:
- W89-0216
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Parsing Technologies
- Month:
- August
- Year:
- 1989
- Address:
- Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA
- Editor:
- Masaru Tomita
- Venue:
- IWPT
- SIG:
- SIGPARSE
- Publisher:
- Carnegy Mellon University
- Note:
- Pages:
- 152–161
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/W89-0216
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Robert E. Wall and Kent Wittenburg. 1989. Predictive Normal Forms for Composition in Categorical Grammars. In Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Parsing Technologies, pages 152–161, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA. Carnegy Mellon University.
- Cite (Informal):
- Predictive Normal Forms for Composition in Categorical Grammars (Wall & Wittenburg, IWPT 1989)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/landing_page/W89-0216.pdf