A generalized parsing framework for Abstract Grammars

Abstract

This technical report presents a general framework for parsing a variety of grammar formalisms. We develop a grammar formalism, called an Abstract Grammar, which is general enough to represent grammars at many levels of the hierarchy, including Context Free Grammars, Minimalist Grammars, and Generalized Context-free Grammars. We then develop a single parsing framework which is capable of parsing grammars which are at least up to GCFGs on the hierarchy. Our parsing framework exposes a grammar interface, so that it can parse any particular grammar formalism that can be reduced to an Abstract Grammar.