Zellig Harris! Sweet!

Epic: "The blind warning the blind about a danger that isn’t there."

Markdown parser/renderer, from John Gruber.

Pratt parsers.

Builds a SPARQL parser in ANTLR -- exactly what I was looking for, as the equivalent ask in JavaCC is *annoying* (thanks to the awful regex support that JavaCC sort-of has).

Implementing a basic kind of symbolic differentiation in ANTLR.

pfp == "pretty fast parser." (== "like the Stanford NLP parser, but faster") Now all I need is a JavaCC grammar for JavaCC grammars, and we'll be good to go, right?

"The following line is the regular expression for breaking-down a URI reference into its components. ^(([^:/?#]+):)?(//([^/?#]*))?([^?#]*)(\?([^#]*))?(#(.*))?"

JavaCC grammar for SPARQL.

Good start-to-finish intro tutorial on using javacc.

JavaCC grammars for a bunch of languages, including Java 5, C, CSS, and XQuery.

This is like those XKCD graphs, where he looks up and graphs the google frequency of different numbers used in common phrases... "M girls, N cups."

[JSTOR: Journal of Linguistics, Vol. 14, No. 1 (Mar., 1978), pp. 1-20]

[JSTOR: American Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 13, No. 4 (Oct., 1976), pp. 237-255]

"JS/CC is the first available parser development system for JavaScript and ECMAScript-derivates. It has been developed, both, with the intention of building a productive compiler development system and with the intention of creating an easy-to-use academic environment for people interested in how parse table generation is done general in bottom-up parsing."

Saw Mark Johnson give a talk about "Adaptor Grammars" (man, that 'o' really bothers me) two days ago. It turned out to be ... an extremely boring talk, although the idea itself seems modestly interesting and it included several reasonable animations of hierarchical Chinese Restaurant processes that were modestly illuminating. At any rate, I sat in the back, doodled on my notebook, and started to idly wonder if issues of "frequentist consistency" for this sort of learning process had been examined (or were even worth examining) at all...

"Yacker parses ABNF and generates parser executables in a variety of languages." Online! Nice.

Wow, this book sure would be an awesome gift.

Via Languagehat. An Onion front page from 1783. Including attacks upon "that Rogue Noah Webster." This is just pure genius.

Things are so much harder, when you don't have reasonable control structures or tail recursion (or, you know, both).

Languagehat reads Middlemarch. "I beg your pardon: correct English is the slang of prigs who write history and essays. And the strongest slang of all is the slang of poets."

"The Link Grammar Parser is a syntactic parser of English, based on link grammar, an original theory of English syntax." Since I've been roaming through Sleator and Lafferty's stuff anyway.

Compiles abstract finite-state-machine descriptions into C or ObjC or C++ or Ruby code to ... execute the finite state machine. Really sweet.

A paper on using 'causal grammars' to induce some Bayesian networks, but not others, on observed data.