Declarative Adaptive Grammars

This page is Copyright John N. Shutt 1996–2001, 2007.  Here's what you're allowed to do with it.
Last modified:  05-Jul-07.

A declarative adaptive grammar model is a grammar model in which the explicit manipulation of rule sets is accomplished by declarative means (as opposed to imperative; see What is an adaptive grammar? ).  That is, the set of rules available to expand a given instance of a nonterminal depends only on where that instance occurs in the syntax tree (rather than arbitrarily on when the instance is expanded, as in imperative adaptive grammars.)

Because declarative adaptive grammars vary their rule sets locally over position in each sentential form, rather than globally from step to step in the derivation, they generally do not have automaton-like configuration, and their derivation relations don't look like automaton computation relations.  See What is a grammar?.

Here is a list of some declarative adaptive grammar models I know about.  I've written HTML summaries of the ones I understand, and most of them are discussed at greater length in my Master's thesis.  (See also the Wikipedia article "Adaptive grammar".)


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