Analysing constraint grammars with a SAT-solver

Paper in proceeding, 2016

We describe a method for analysing Constraint Grammars (CG) that can detect internal conflicts and redundancies in a given grammar, without the need for a corpus. The aim is for grammar writers to be able to automatically diagnose, and then manually improve their grammars. Our method works by translating the given grammar into logical constraints that are analysed by a SAT-solver. We have evaluated our analysis on a number of non-trivial grammars and found inconsistencies.