Principles and implementation of deductive parsing

This work presents a system for generating parsers based directly on the metaphor of parsing as deduction, which generalizes easily to parsers for augmented phrase structure formalisms, such as definite-clause grammars and other logic grammar formalisms.

Abstract

We present a system for generating parsers based directly on the metaphor of parsing as deduction. Parsing algorithms can be represented directly as deduction systems, and a single deduction engine can interpret such deduction systems so as to implement the corresponding parser. The method generalizes easily to parsers for augmented phrase structure formalisms, such as definite-clause grammars and other logic grammar formalisms, and has been used for rapid prototyping of parsing algorithms for a variety of formalisms including variants of tree-adjoining grammars, categorial grammars, and lexicalized context-free grammars.