Partially Ordered Multiset Context-Free Grammars And Free-Word-Order Parsing

We present a new formalism, partially ordered multiset context-free grammars (pomsCFG), along with an Earley-style parsing algorithm. The formalism, which can be thought of as a generalization of context-free grammars with partially ordered right-hand sides, is of interest in its own right, and also as infrastructure for obtaining tighter complexity bounds for more expressive context-free formalisms intended to express free or multiple word-order, such as ID/LP grammars. We reduce ID/LP grammars to poms-grammars, thereby getting finer-grained bounds on the parsing complexity of ID/LP grammars. We argue that in practice, the width of attested ID/LP grammars is small, yielding effectively polynomial time complexity for ID/LP grammar parsing