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Lecture 12 14

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23 views

Lecture 12 14

Uploaded by

Sumit Kumar
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Natural Language Processing

- Formal Language -

(formal) Language
(formal) Grammar
Formal Language
A formal language L is a set of finite-length
words (or "strings") over some finite
alphabet A.  is the empty word.
Example:
A = {a, b, c}
L1 = {ab, c}
Formal Languages - Examples
Some examples of formal languages:
• the set of all words over {a, b},
• the set { an | n is a prime number },
• the set of syntactically correct programs in
some programming language, or
• the set of inputs upon which a certain
Turing machine halts.
Several operations can be used to produce new languages from
given ones. Suppose L1 and L2 are languages over some common
alphabet.
• The concatenation L1L2 consists of all strings of the form vw
where v is a string from L1 and w is a string from L2.
• The intersection of L1 and L2 consists of all strings which are
contained in L1 and also in L2.
• The union of L1 and L2 consists of all strings which are contained
in L1 or in L2.
• The complement of the language L1 consists of all strings over the
alphabet which are not contained in L1.
• The Kleene star L1* consists of all strings which can be written in
the form w1w2...wn with strings wi in L1 and n ≥ 0. Note that this
includes the empty string ε because n = 0 is allowed.
A formal language can be specified in a great
variety of ways, such as:
• Strings produced by some formal grammar (see
Chomsky hierarchy)
• Strings produced by a regular expression
• Strings accepted by some automaton, such as a
Turing machine or finite state automaton
• From a set of related YES/NO questions those
ones for which the answer is YES, see decision
problem
Formal Grammar - Definition

A formal grammar G = (N, Σ, P, S) consists of:


• A finite set N of nonterminal symbols.
• A finite set Σ of terminal symbols that is disjoint from
N.
• A finite set P of production rules where a rule is of the
form
• string in (Σ U N)* -> string in (Σ U N)*
– (where * is the Kleene star and U is set union)
– the left-hand side of a rule must contain at least one
nonterminal symbol.
• A symbol S in N that is indicated as the start symbol.
Language of a Formal Grammar

The language of a formal grammar G = (N, Σ, P,


S), denoted as L(G), is defined as all those
strings over Σ that can be generated by starting
with the start symbol S and then applying the
production rules in P until no more nonterminal
symbols are present.
Language of a Formal Grammar

Example
Consider, for example, the grammar G with N =
{S, B}, Σ = {a, b, c}, P consisting of the
following production rules
1. S -> aBSc
2. S -> abc
3. Ba -> aB
4. Bb -> bb

This grammar defines the language {anbncn | n>0}


Chomsky's four types of grammars
• Type-0 grammars (unrestricted grammars)
languages recognized by a Turing machine
• Type-1 grammars (context-sensitive grammars)
Turing machine with bounded tape
• Type-2 grammars (context-free grammars)
non-deterministic pushdown automaton
• Type-3 grammars (regular grammars)
regular expressions, finite state automaton
Grammars, Languages, Machines

Type-0
Recursively enumerable Turing machine No restrictions
Type-1
Context-sensitive Linear-bounded αAβ -> αγβ
non-deterministic
Turing machine
Type-2
Context-free Non-deterministic A -> γ
pushdown automaton
Type-3
Regular Finite state automaton A -> aB
A -> a
Example

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