On the Complexity of CCG Parsing

Marco Kuhlmann, Giorgio Satta, Peter Jonsson


Abstract
We study the parsing complexity of Combinatory Categorial Grammar (CCG) in the formalism of Vijay-Shanker and Weir (1994). As our main result, we prove that any parsing algorithm for this formalism will take in the worst case exponential time when the size of the grammar, and not only the length of the input sentence, is included in the analysis. This sets the formalism of Vijay-Shanker and Weir (1994) apart from weakly equivalent formalisms such as Tree Adjoining Grammar, for which parsing can be performed in time polynomial in the combined size of grammar and input sentence. Our results contribute to a refined understanding of the class of mildly context-sensitive grammars, and inform the search for new, mildly context-sensitive versions of CCG.
Anthology ID:
J18-3004
Volume:
Computational Linguistics, Volume 44, Issue 3 - September 2018
Month:
September
Year:
2018
Address:
Cambridge, MA
Venue:
CL
SIG:
Publisher:
MIT Press
Note:
Pages:
447–482
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/J18-3004
DOI:
10.1162/coli_a_00324
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Marco Kuhlmann, Giorgio Satta, and Peter Jonsson. 2018. On the Complexity of CCG Parsing. Computational Linguistics, 44(3):447–482.
Cite (Informal):
On the Complexity of CCG Parsing (Kuhlmann et al., CL 2018)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/J18-3004.pdf