A Cubic Time Extension of Context-Free Grammars

Abstract

Context-free grammars and cubic parse time are so related in people's minds that they often think that parsing any extension of context-free grammars must need some extra time. Of course, this is not necessarily true and this paper presents a generalization of context-free grammars which nonetheless still has a cubic parse time complexity. This extension, which defines a subclass of context-sensitive languages, has both a theoretical and a practical interest. The class of languages defined by these grammars is closed under both intersection and complement (in fact this class contains both the intersection and the complement of context-free languages). Moreover, these languages belong to an extension of mildly context-sensitive languages in which the constant growth property is relaxed and which can thus potentially be used in natural language processing.