Estimating Strictly Piecewise Distributions

Strictly Piecewise (SP) languages are a subclass of regular languages which encode certain kinds of long-distance dependencies that are found in natural languages. Like the classes in the Chomsky and Subregular hierarchies, there are many independently converging characterizations of the SP class (Rogers et al., to appear). Here we define SP distributions and show that they can be efficiently estimated from positive data.

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: ACL
• Authors: Jeffrey Heinz, James Rogers
• Keywords: ACL 2010, Computational Linguistics, Long-distance Dependencies, Regular Languages, SP Class