Natural language as a formal language
Keywords:
formal languages, natural language, formal grammar, parsing, syntactic analysis, computational linguistics, natural language processing, machine learningAbstract
Formal languages theory is useful for the study of natural language. In particular, it is of interest to study the adequacy of the grammatical formalisms to express syntactic phenomena present in natural language. First, it helps to draw hypotheses about the nature and complexity of the speaker-hearer linguistic competence, a fundamental question in linguistics and other cognitive sciences. Moreover, from an engineering point of view, it allows for the knowledge of practical limitations of applications based on those formalisms. This article introduces the problem of adequacy of grammatical formalisms for natural language, also introducing some formal language theory concepts required for this discussion. Then, it reviews the formalisms that have been proposed through history, and the arguments that have been given to support or reject their adequacy.
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