Stack Transducers for Natural Language Interfaces

We introduce and investigate stack transducers, which are one-way stack automata with an output tape. A one-way stack automaton is a classical pushdown automaton with the additional ability to move the stack head inside the stack without altering the contents. For stack transducers, we distinguish between a digging and a non-digging mode. In digging mode, the stack transducer can write on the output tape when its stack head is inside the stack, whereas in non-digging mode, the stack transducer is only allowed to emit symbols when its stack head is at the top of the stack. These stack transducers have a motivation from natural language interface applications, as they capture long-distance dependencies in syntactic, semantic, and discourse structures. We study the computational capacity for deterministic digging and non-digging stack transducers, as well as for their non-erasing and checking versions. We finally show that even for the strongest variant of stack transducers the stack languages are regular.