Edward P. Stabler

TCS Journal 2003 Journal Article

Structural similarity within and among languages

• Edward P. Stabler
• Edward L. Keenan

Linguists rely on intuitive conceptions of structure when comparing expressions and languages. In an algebraic presentation of a language, some natural notions of similarity can be rigorously defined (e. g. among elements of a language, equivalence w. r. t. isomorphisms of the language; and among languages, equivalence w. r. t. isomorphisms of symmetry groups), but it turns out that slightly more complex and nonstandard notions are needed to capture the kinds of comparisons linguists want to make. This paper identifies some of the important notions of structural similarity, with attention to similarity claims that are prominent in the current linguistic tradition of transformational grammar.

AIJ Journal 1993 Journal Article

Parsing as non-Horn deduction

• Edward P. Stabler

AAAI Conference 1986 Conference Paper

Restricting Logic Grammars

• Edward P. Stabler

A parser formalism for natural languages that is so restricted as to rule out the definition of linguistic structures that do not occur in any natural language can make the task of grammar construction easier, whether it is done manually (by a programmer) or automatically (by a grammar induction system). A restrictive grammar formalism for logic programming languages is presented that imposes some of the constraints suggested by recent Chomskian linguistic theory. In spite of these restrictions, this formalism allows for relatively elegant characterizations of natural languages that can be translated into efficient prolog parsers.

AAAI Conference 1983 Conference Paper

Deterministic and Bottom-Up Parsing in Prolog

• Edward P. Stabler

It is well known that top-down backtracking context free parsers are easy to write in Prolog, and that these parsers can be extended to give them the power of ATN’s. This report shows that a number of other familiar parser designs can be very naturally implemented in Prolog. The top-down parsers can easily be constrained to do deterministic parsing of LL(k) languages. Bottom-up backtrack parsers can also be elegantly implemented and similarly constrained to do deterministic LR(k) parsing. Very natural extensions of these LR(k) parser designs suffice for deterministic parsing of natural languages of the sort carried out by the Marcus(1980) parser.