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Reducing non-determinism in right nulled GLR parsers

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Abstract.

Tomita’s general parsing algorithm is linear on LR(1) grammars but fails to terminate on grammars with hidden left recursion and is not efficient in the presence of \(\epsilon\)-rules. When Right Nulled (RN) parse tables are used Tomita style GLR algorithms operate correctly and more efficiently on all context free grammars. However, an RN table may contain more conflicts than the corresponding LR table, making the construction of parts of the internal structure redundant. We show that in certain cases conflicts can be removed from an RN table without compromising the correctness of the associated parser. In particular, all conflicts can be removed if the grammar is LR(1). This improves the performance of the parser and allows resolved RN tables for LR(1) grammars to be used with standard (deterministic) LR stack-based parsing algorithms, adding the ‘short-circuiting’ of right nullable reductions to the armoury of efficient implementation techniques for such algorithms.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, Royal Holloway, University of London, TW20 0EX, Egham, Surrey, UK

    Elizabeth Scott & Adrian Johnstone

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  1. Elizabeth Scott
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  2. Adrian Johnstone
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Correspondence to Elizabeth Scott.

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Received: 5 December 2002, Published online: 30 March 2004

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Scott, E., Johnstone, A. Reducing non-determinism in right nulled GLR parsers. Acta Informatica 40, 459–489 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00236-004-0137-z

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00236-004-0137-z

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