An embedded pushdown automaton or EPDA is a computational model for parsing languages generated by tree-adjoining grammars (TAGs). It is similar to the context-free grammar-parsing pushdown automaton, except that instead of using a plain stack to store symbols, it has a stack of iterated stacks that store symbols, giving TAGs a generative capacity between context-free grammars and context-sensitive grammars, or a subset of the mildly context-sensitive grammars. Embedded pushdown automata should not be confused with nested stack automata which have more computational power.
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History and applications
EPDAs were first described by K. Vijay-Shanker in his 1988 doctoral thesis. They have since been applied to more complete descriptions of classes of mildly context-sensitive grammars and have had important roles in refining the Chomsky hierarchy. Various subgrammars, such as the linear indexed grammar, can thus be defined. EPDAs are also beginning to play an important role in natural language processing.
While natural languages have traditionally been analyzed using context-free grammars (see transformational-generative grammar and computational linguistics), this model does not work well for languages with crossed dependencies, such as Dutch, situations for which an EPDA is well suited. A detailed linguistic analysis is available in Joshi, Schabes (1997).
Theory
An EPDA is a finite state machine with a set of stacks that can be themselves accessed through the embedded stack. Each stack contains elements of the stack alphabet
Each stack can then be defined in terms of its elements, so we denote the
We define an EPDA by the septuple (7-tuple)
Thus the transition function takes a state, the next symbol of the input string, and the top symbol of the current stack and generates the next state, the stacks to be pushed and popped onto the embedded stack, the pushing and popping of the current stack, and the stacks to be considered the current stacks in the next transition. More conceptually, the embedded stack is pushed and popped, the current stack is optionally pushed back onto the embedded stack, and any other stacks one would like are pushed on top of that, with the last stack being the one read from in the next iteration. Therefore, stacks can be pushed both above and below the current stack.
A given configuration is defined by
where
where
An informal description of EPDA can also be found in Joshi, Schabes (1997), Sect.7, p.23-25.
k-order EPDA and the Weir hierarchy
A more precisely defined hierarchy of languages that correspond to the mildly context-sensitive class was defined by David J. Weir. Based on the work of Nabil A. Khabbaz, Weir's Control Language Hierarchy is a containment hierarchy of countable set of language classes where the Level-1 is defined as context-free, and Level-2 is the class of tree-adjoining and the other three grammars.
Following are some of the properties of Level-k languages in the hierarchy:
Those properties correspond well (at least for small k > 1) to the conditions of mildly context-sensitive languages imposed by Joshi, and as k gets bigger, the language class becomes, in a sense, less mildly context-sensitive.