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7.1 Context Free Grammars: 7.1.1 The Basics

This document discusses context-free grammars. It begins by introducing the basics of context-free grammars, including terminal symbols, non-terminal symbols, rewrite rules, and derivations. It then explains that context-free grammars can be interpreted as either rewrite rules or as tree admissibility rules, where parse trees correspond to derivations. The document concludes by providing a simple grammar for English as an example.

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96 views5 pages

7.1 Context Free Grammars: 7.1.1 The Basics

This document discusses context-free grammars. It begins by introducing the basics of context-free grammars, including terminal symbols, non-terminal symbols, rewrite rules, and derivations. It then explains that context-free grammars can be interpreted as either rewrite rules or as tree admissibility rules, where parse trees correspond to derivations. The document concludes by providing a simple grammar for English as an example.

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7.1 Context Free Grammars


Let's begin by going through some basic ideas about context-free
grammars. I'll start by using simple grammars that generate formal
languages, rather than natural language examples, as the formal
examples are typically shorter.

7.1.1 The Basics

Here's a simple context free grammar (CFG):

Some terminology. The is called the rewrite arrow, and the four
expressions listed above are called context free rules (you may also
see them called rewrite rules, or something similar).

Apart from the , there are two sorts of symbols in this grammar:
terminal symbols and non-terminal symbols. In the above grammar,
the terminal symbols are `a' and `b', and the non-terminal symbols are
`S', `A', and `B'. Terminal symbols never occur to the left of a rewrite
arrow. Non-terminal symbols may occur either to the right or the left of
the rewrite arrow (for example, the `S' in the above grammar occurs
both to the right and the left of in the second rule). Every context
free grammar has one special symbol, the start or sentence symbol,
which is usually written `S'. Some context free grammars also use
another special symbol, namely , for the empty string. The symbol
can only occur on the right hand side of context free rules. For
example, we could add the rule to the above grammar, but we
could not add .

The simplest interpretation of context free grammars is the rewrite


interpretation. This views CFGs as rules which let us rewrite the start
symbol S to other strings: each rule is interpreted as saying that we
can replace an occurrence of the symbol on the left side of the rule by
the symbol(s) on the right side.

For example, the above grammar lets us rewrite `S' to `aabb':

S
ASB Rule 2
aSB Rule 3
aSb Rule 4
aABb Rule 1
aaBb Rule 3
aabb Rule 4

Such a sequence is called a derivation of the symbols in the last row.


For example, the above sequence is a derivation of the string `aabb'.
Note that there may be many derivations of the same string. For
example,

S
ASB Rule 2
ASb Rule 4
aSb Rule 3
aABb Rule 1
aAbb Rule 4
aabb Rule 3

is another derivation of `aabb'.

Why are such grammars called `context free'? Because all rules
contain only one symbol on the left hand side --- and wherever we see
that symbol while doing a derivation, we are free to replace it with the
stuff on the right hand side. That is, the `context' in which a symbol on
the left hand side of a rule occurs is unimportant --- we can always use
the rule to make the rewrite while doing a derivation. (There are more
complex kinds of grammars, with more than one symbol on the left
hand side of the rewrite arrow, in which the symbols to the right and
left have to be taken into account before making a rewrite. Such
grammars can be linguistically important, but we won't study them in
this course.)

The language generated by a context free grammar is the set of


terminal symbols that can be derived starting from the start symbol `S'.
For example, the above grammar generates the language (the
language consisting of all strings consisting of a block of as followed
by a block of bs of equal length, except the empty string). And if we
added the rule to this grammar we would generate the
language .

A language is called context free if it is generated by some context free


grammar. For example, the language is context free, and so is
the language , for we have just seen that these can be produced by
CFGs. Not all languages are context free. For example, is not.
That is, no matter how hard you try to find CFG rules that generate this
language, you won't succeed. No CFG can do the job.
7.1.2 The Tree Admissibility Interpretation

While the rewrite interpretation of CFGs is important, there is a more


fundamental way of thinking about CFGs, namely as tree admissibility
rules.

A parse tree is a finite tree all of whose interior nodes (that is, nodes
with daughters) are licensed or admitted by a grammar rule. What
does this mean? Let's look at an example:

This tree is licensed by our grammar --- that is, the presence of every
node with daughters can be justified by some rule. For example. the
top node is ok, because under the tree admissibility interpretation we
read as saying: A tree node labelled can have exactly
three daughters, labelled (reading left to right) , , and . The node
labelled A is ok, because under the tree admissibility we read the rule
as saying: A tree node labelled can have exactly one
daughter which is labelled . Similarly, all the other nodes with
daughters are `justified' or `admitted' by other rules (the terminal nodes
of the tree don't need to be justified).

If you think about it, you will see there is a close correspondence
between parse trees and derivations: every derivation corresponds to
a parse tree, and every parse tree corresponds to (maybe many)
derivations. For example, the tree above corresponds to both our
earlier derivations of `aabb'.

The tree admissibility interpretation is important for two reasons. First,


it is the linguistically most fundamental interpretation. We don't think of
natural language as a bunch of strings that need rewriting --- we think
of natural language sentences, and noun phrases and so on as having
structure, tree structure. Thus we think of CFG rules as telling us
which tree structures we have.

Second, the idea of parse trees brings us to an important concept:


ambiguity. A string is ambiguous if it has two distinct parse trees. Note:
I said `parse trees', not `derivations'. For example, we derived the
string `aabb' in two different ways from our little grammar --- but both
ways correspond to the same derivation tree. That is, the string `aabb'
is not ambiguous in this grammar. And in fact, no string this grammar
generates is ambiguous.
But some grammars do generate ambiguous strings. One of this
week's exercises is to come up with a simple example of such a
grammar.

7.1.3 A Little Grammar of English

The above ideas adapt straightforwardly to natural languages. But with


natural languages it is useful to draw a distinction between rules which
have syntactic categories on the right hand side, and rules which have
only words on the right hand side (these are called lexical rules).

Here's a simple grammar of English. First we have the following rules:

Then we have the following lexical rules.

So in this grammar, our terminal symbols are the words. There is a


special word for the symbols (such as N, PN, and Det) which occur in
lexical rules: they are called preterminal symbols.
This grammar is unambiguous. That is no string has two distinct parse
trees. (Incidentally, this means that it is not a realistic grammar of
English: all natural languages are highly ambiguous.) But it does
display an interesting (and troublesome) phenomenon called local
ambiguity.

Consider the sentence ``The robber knew Vincent shot Marsellus''.


This has a unique parse tree in this grammar. But now look at the first
part of it: ``The robber knew Vincent''. This is also a sentence
according to this grammar --- but not when considered as a part of
``The robber knew Vincent shot Marsellus''. This can be a problem for
a parser. Locally we have something that looks like a sentence --- and
a parser may prove that this part really is a sentence according to the
grammar. But this information does not play a role in analyzing the
larger sentence of which it is a part.

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Patrick Blackburn and Kristina Striegnitz


Version 1.2.4 (20020829)

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