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This is because the two subjects were largely indistinguishable until fairly recently. Most of the theory for language parsing came from efforts to describe nat
by catpolice 8y ago
This is because the two subjects were largely indistinguishable until fairly recently. Most of the theory for language parsing came from efforts to describe natural languages in terms of formal grammars, and until ALGOL, most programming languages didn't have especially complex grammars. So until recently, the study of formal languages was a linguistics thing - it's since become much more popular in the CS world.
- Al-Khwarizmi 8y agoCertainly they share a common root, but "largely indistinguishable until fairly recently" is quite an overstatement. They have had distinct goals and methods for at least 50 years, and for the last 20 years the overlap has been minimal. CKY is from the 60s. Inside-outside from the 70s. Mild context sensitivity, tree adjoining grammars and other similar formalisms from the 70s-80s. Chart parsers that actually work for natural language in real life scenarios from the 90s (Collins, Charniak, Eisner). All that is seminal work in natural language parsing and mostly useless for compilers, just like LR is mostly useless for natural language.
- catpolice 8y agoSorry, I'm from a philosophy background so I think of anything published in the last ~100 years as "fairly recent" ;) All I meant was that that many ideas and methods developed originally for linguistics were taken up and expanded upon in programming language research, so that they had a great deal of overlap until about half way through the timeline in the link.
- jcranmer 8y agoProgramming languages didn't exist in any meaningful sense until the 1950s, and the theoretical framework didn't really exist until the 1960s. There's very little cross-pollination between compiler and natural language theory, both before and after the time. Strip out the notion of the CFG (a one-way development), and there's not really any overlap.