This second edition of Grune and Jacobs’ brilliant work presents new developments and discoveries that have been made in the field. Parsing, also referred to as syntax analysis, has been and continues to be an essential part of computer science and linguistics. Parsing techniques have grown considerably in importance, both in computer science, ie. advanced compilers often use general CF parsers, and computational linguistics where such parsers are the only option. They are used in a variety of software products including Web browsers, interpreters in computer devices, and data compression programs; and they are used extensively in linguistics.

This work is Volume II of a two-volume monograph on the theory of deterministic parsing of context-free grammars. Volume I, "Languages and Parsing" (Chapters 1 to 5), was an introduction to the basic concepts of formal language theory and context-free parsing. Volume II (Chapters 6 to 10) contains a thorough treat ment of the theory of the two most important deterministic parsing methods: LR(k) and LL(k) parsing. Volume II is a continuation of Volume I; together these two volumes form an integrated work, with chapters, theorems, lemmas, etc. numbered consecutively. Volume II begins with Chapter 6 in which the classical con structions pertaining to LR(k) parsing are presented. These include the canonical LR(k) parser, and its reduced variants such as the LALR(k) parser and the SLR(k) parser. The grammarclasses for which these parsers are deterministic are called LR(k) grammars, LALR(k) grammars and SLR(k) grammars; properties of these grammars are also investigated in Chapter 6. A great deal of attention is paid to the rigorous development of the theory: detailed mathematical proofs are provided for most of the results presented.

Most discourse researchers assume that full semantic understanding is necessary to derive the discourse structure of texts. This book documents an attempt to construct and use automatic and non-semantic computational structures for text summarization.

How does a parser, a device that imposes an analysis on a string of symbols so that they can be interpreted, work? More specifically, how does the parser in the human cognitive mechanism operate? Using a wide range of empirical data concerning human natural language processing, Bradley Pritchett demonstrates that parsing performance depends on grammatical competence, not, as many have thought, on perception, computation, or semantics. Pritchett critiques the major performance-based parsing models to argue that the principles of grammar drive the parser; the parser, furthermore, is the apparatus that tries to enforce the conditions of the grammar at every point in the processing of a sentence. In comparing garden path phenomena, those instances when the parser fails on the first reading of a sentence and must reanalyze it, with occasions when the parser successfully functions the first time around, Pritchett makes a convincing case for a grammar-derived parsing theory.

This work is Volume II of a two-volume monograph on the theory of deterministic parsing of context-free grammars. Volume I, "Languages and Parsing" (Chapters 1 to 5), was an introduction to the basic concepts of formal language theory and context-free parsing. Volume II (Chapters 6 to 10) contains a thorough treat ment of the theory of the two most important deterministic parsing methods: LR(k) and LL(k) parsing. Volume II is a continuation of Volume I; together these two volumes form an integrated work, with chapters, theorems, lemmas, etc. numbered consecutively. Volume II begins with Chapter 6 in which the classical con structions pertaining to LR(k) parsing are presented. These include the canonical LR(k) parser, and its reduced variants such as the LALR(k) parser and the SLR(k) parser. The grammarclasses for which these parsers are deterministic are called LR(k) grammars, LALR(k) grammars and SLR(k) grammars; properties of these grammars are also investigated in Chapter 6. A great deal of attention is paid to the rigorous development of the theory: detailed mathematical proofs are provided for most of the results presented.

Parsing, the syntactic analysis of language, has been studied extensively in computer science and computational linguistics. Computer programs and natural languages share an underlying theory of formal languages and require efficient parsing algorithms. This introduction reviews the theory of parsing from a novel perspective. It provides a formalism to capture the essential traits of a parser that abstracts from the fine detail and allows a uniform description and comparison of a variety of parsers, including Earley, Tomita, LR, Left-Corner, and Head-Corner parsers. The emphasis is on context-free phrase structure grammar and how these parsers can be extended to unification formalisms. The book combines mathematical rigor with high readability and is suitable as a graduate course text.