Parsing, the syntactic analysis of language, has been studied
extensively in computer science and computational linguistics. Computer
programs and natural languages share an underlying theory of formal
languages and require efficient parsing algorithms. This introduction
reviews the theory of parsing from a novel perspective. It provides a
formalism to capture the essential traits of a parser that abstracts
from the fine detail and allows a uniform description and comparison of
a variety of parsers, including Earley, Tomita, LR, Left-Corner, and
Head-Corner parsers. The emphasis is on context-free phrase structure
grammar and how these parsers can be extended to unification formalisms.
The book combines mathematical rigor with high readability and is
suitable as a graduate course text.