Automatic Generation of Natural Language Parsers from Declarative Specifications

The parsing schemata formalism allows us to describe parsing algorithms in a simple way by capturing their fundamental semantics while abstracting low-level detail. In this work, we present a compilation technique allowing the automatic transformation of parsing schemata to executable implementations of their corresponding algorithms. Taking a simple description of a schema as input, our technique generates Java code for the corresponding parsing algorithm, including schema-specific indexing code in order to attain efficiency. Our technique is general enough to be able to handle all kinds of schemata for context-free grammars and other grammatical formalisms, providing an extensibility mechanism which allows the user to define custom notational elements.