Context-free Grammar - Background

Background

Since the time of Pāṇini, at least, linguists have described the grammars of languages in terms of their block structure, and described how sentences are recursively built up from smaller phrases, and eventually individual words or word elements. An essential property of these block structures is that logical units never overlap. For example, the sentence:

John, whose blue car was in the garage, walked to the grocery store.

can be logically parenthesized as follows:

(John, ((whose blue car) (was (in the garage))), (walked (to (the grocery store)))).

A context-free grammar provides a simple and mathematically precise mechanism for describing the methods by which phrases in some natural language are built from smaller blocks, capturing the "block structure" of sentences in a natural way. Its simplicity makes the formalism amenable to rigorous mathematical study. Important features of natural language syntax such as agreement and reference are not part of the context-free grammar, but the basic recursive structure of sentences, the way in which clauses nest inside other clauses, and the way in which lists of adjectives and adverbs are swallowed by nouns and verbs, is described exactly.

The formalism of context-free grammars was developed in the mid-1950s by Noam Chomsky, and also their classification as a special type of formal grammar (which he called phrase-structure grammars). What Chomsky called a phrase structure grammar is also known now as a constituency grammar, whereby constituency grammars stand in contrast to dependency grammars. In Chomsky's generative grammar framework, the syntax of natural language was described by context-free rules combined with transformation rules.

Block structure was introduced into computer programming languages by the Algol project (1957–1960), which, as a consequence, also featured a context-free grammar to describe the resulting Algol syntax. This became a standard feature of computer languages, and the notation for grammars used in concrete descriptions of computer languages came to be known as Backus-Naur Form, after two members of the Algol language design committee. The "block structure" aspect that context-free grammars capture is so fundamental to grammar that the terms syntax and grammar are often identified with context-free grammar rules, especially in computer science. Formal constraints not captured by the grammar are then considered to be part of the "semantics" of the language.

Context-free grammars are simple enough to allow the construction of efficient parsing algorithms which, for a given string, determine whether and how it can be generated from the grammar. An Earley parser is an example of such an algorithm, while the widely used LR and LL parsers are simpler algorithms that deal only with more restrictive subsets of context-free grammars.