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Unification grammars are known to be Turing-equivalent; given a grammar G and a word w, it is undecidable whether w L(G). In order to ensure decidability, several constraints on grammars, commonly known as off-line parsability (OLP), were suggested, such that the recognition problem is decidable for grammars which satisfy OLP. An open question is whether it is decidable if a given grammar satisfies OLP. In this paper we investigate various definitions of OLP and discuss their interrelations, proving that some of (...) the OLP variants are indeed undecidable. We then present a novel, decidable OLP constraint which is more liberal than the existing decidable ones. (shrink)

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Unification grammars are widely accepted as an expressive means for describing the structure of natural languages. In general, the recognition problem is undecidable for unification grammars. Even with restricted variants of the formalism, off-line parsable grammars, the problem is computationally hard. We present two natural constraints on unification grammars which limit their expressivity and allow for efficient processing. We first show that non-reentrant unification grammars generate exactly the class of context-free languages. We then relax the constraint and show that one-reentrant (...) unification grammars generate exactly the class of mildly context-sensitive languages. We thus relate the commonly used and linguistically motivated formalism of unification grammars to more restricted, computationally tractable classes of languages. (shrink)

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Typed feature structures are used extensively for the specification of linguistic information in many formalisms. The subsumption relation orders TFSs by their information content. We prove that subsumption of acyclic TFSs is well founded, whereas in the presence of cycles general TFS subsumption is not well founded. We show an application of this result for parsing, where the well-foundedness of subsumption is used to guarantee termination for grammars that are off-line parsable. We define a new version of off-line parsability that (...) is less strict than the existing one; thus termination is guaranteed for parsing with a larger set of grammars. (shrink)

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Polarized unification grammar (PUG) is a linguistic formalism which uses polarities to better control the way grammar fragments interact. The grammar combination operation of PUG was conjectured to be associative. We show that PUG grammar combination is not associative, and even attaching polarities to objects does not make it order-independent. Moreover, we prove that no non-trivial polarity system exists for which grammar combination is associative. We then redefine the grammar combination operator, moving to the powerset domain, in a way that (...) guarantees associativity. The method we propose is general and is applicable to a variety of tree-based grammar formalisms. (shrink)

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