Elsevier

Information Sciences

Volume 66, Issues 1–2, 1 December 1992, Pages 1-22
Information Sciences

Relating attribute grammars and lexical-functional grammars

https://doi.org/10.1016/0020-0255(92)90084-LGet rights and content

Abstract

In this paper, some similarities between attribute grammars (AGs) and lexical-functional grammars (LFGs) are shown from computational theoretic points of view. First we introduce two types of LFGs that are called restricted LFGs (RLFGs) and polynomial LFGs. Then we characterize these LFGs as string-valued AGs (SAGs) or strongly polynomial AGs (SPAGs). To be precise, it is shown that

  • 1.

    (1) a set of f-descriptions of an RLFG can be characterized as an output set of an SAG

  • 2.

    (2) a language generated by a polynomial RLFG can be characterized as a language generated by an SPAG.

Using these characterizations, we estimate the complexity of languages generated by these LFGs.

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Current address: Tetsuro Nishino, JAIST, Hokuriku, Tatsunokuchi, Ishikawa 923-12, Japan.

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