License: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license (CC BY 3.0)
When quoting this document, please refer to the following
DOI: 10.4230/OASIcs.SLATE.2019.7
URN: urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-108743
URL: http://dagstuhl.sunsite.rwth-aachen.de/volltexte/2019/10874/
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Nogatz, Falco ; Seipel, Dietmar ; Abreu, Salvador

Definite Clause Grammars with Parse Trees: Extension for Prolog

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OASIcs-SLATE-2019-7.pdf (0.5 MB)

Abstract

Definite Clause Grammars (DCGs) are a convenient way to specify possibly non-context-free grammars for natural and formal languages. They can be used to progressively build a parse tree as grammar rules are applied by providing an extra argument in the DCG rule's head. In the simplest way, this is a structure that contains the name of the used nonterminal. This extension of a DCG has been proposed for natural language processing in the past and can be done automatically in Prolog using term expansion.
We extend this approach by a meta-nonterminal to specify optional and sequences of nonterminals, as these structures are common in grammars for formal, domain-specific languages. We specify a term expansion that represents these sequences as lists while preserving the grammar's ability to be used both for parsing and serialising, i.e. to create a parse tree by a given source code and vice-versa. We show that this mechanism can be used to lift grammars specified in extended Backus-Naur form (EBNF) to generate parse trees. As a case study, we present a parser for the Prolog programming language itself based only on the grammars given in the ISO Prolog standard which produces corresponding parse trees.

BibTeX - Entry

@InProceedings{nogatz_et_al:OASIcs:2019:10874,
  author =	{Falco Nogatz and Dietmar Seipel and Salvador Abreu},
  title =	{{Definite Clause Grammars with Parse Trees: Extension for Prolog}},
  booktitle =	{8th Symposium on Languages, Applications and Technologies (SLATE 2019)},
  pages =	{7:1--7:14},
  series =	{OpenAccess Series in Informatics (OASIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-114-6},
  ISSN =	{2190-6807},
  year =	{2019},
  volume =	{74},
  editor =	{Ricardo Rodrigues and Jan Janousek and Lu{\'\i}s Ferreira and Lu{\'\i}sa Coheur and Fernando Batista and Hugo Gon{\c{c}}alo Oliveira},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl--Leibniz-Zentrum fuer Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{http://drops.dagstuhl.de/opus/volltexte/2019/10874},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-108743},
  doi =		{10.4230/OASIcs.SLATE.2019.7},
  annote =	{Keywords: Definite Clause Grammar, Prolog, Term Expansion, Parse Tree, EBNF}
}

Keywords: Definite Clause Grammar, Prolog, Term Expansion, Parse Tree, EBNF
Collection: 8th Symposium on Languages, Applications and Technologies (SLATE 2019)
Issue Date: 2019
Date of publication: 24.07.2019
Supplementary Material: The source codes of library(dcg4pt) and library(plammar) are available on GitHub at https://github.com/fnogatz/dcg4pt and https://github.com/fnogatz/plammar (MIT License).

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