Multi-Component Tree Insertion Grammars

Abstract : In this paper we introduce a new mildly context sensitive formalism called Multi-Component Tree Insertion Grammar. This formalism is a generalization of Tree Insertion Grammars in the same sense that Multi-Component Tree Adjoining Grammars is a generalization of Tree Adjoining Grammars. We show that this class of grammatical formalisms is equivalent to Multi-Component Tree Adjoining Grammars, and that it also defines a hierarchy of languages whose supplementary formal power between two increasing levels is more gently delivered than the one given by Multi-Component Tree Adjoining Grammars. We show that Multi-Component Tree Insertion Grammars and simple Range Concatenation Grammars are equivalent and we show how to transform a grammar of one type into an equivalent grammar of the other type. Such a transformation gives a method to build efficient parsers for Multi-Component Tree Insertion Languages.