Communication papers of the Federated Conference on DOI: 10.15439/2017F162 Computer Science and Information Systems, pp. 165–173 ISSN 2300-5963 ACSIS, Vol. 13 Parsing with Earley Virtual Machines Audrius Saikˇ unas¯ Institute of Mathematics and Informatics Akademijos 4, LT-08663 Vilnius, Lithuania Email:
[email protected] Abstract—Earley parser is a well-known parsing method used EVM is capable of parsing context-free languages with data- to analyse context-free grammars. While being less efficient in dependant constraints. The core idea behind of EVM is to practical contexts than other generalized context-free parsing have two different grammar representations: one is user- algorithms, such as GLR, it is also more general. As such it can be used as a foundation to build more complex parsing algorithms. friendly and used to define grammars, while the other is used We present a new, virtual machine based approach to parsing, internally during parsing. Therefore, we end up with grammars heavily based on the original Earley parser. We present several that specify the languages in a user-friendly way, which are variations of the Earley Virtual Machine, each with increasing then compiled into grammar programs that are executed or feature set. The final version of the Earley Virtual Machine is interpreted by the EVM to match various input sequences. capable of parsing context-free grammars with data-dependant constraints and support grammars with regular right hand sides We present several iterations of EVM: and regular lookahead. • EVM0 that is equivalent to the original Earley parser in We show how to translate grammars into virtual machine it’s capabilities.