Tree-Adjoining Grammar Parsing and Boolean Matrix Multiplication

The computational problem of parsing a sentence in a tree-adjoining language is investigated. An interesting relation is studied between this problem and the well-known computational problem of Boolean matrix multiplication: it is shown that any algorithm for the solution of the former problem can easily be converted into an algorithm for the solution of the latter problem. This result bears on at least two important computational issues. First, we realize that a straightforward method that improves the known upper bound for tree-adjoining grammar parsing is hard to find. Second, we understand which features of the tree-adjoining grammar parsing problem are responsible for the claimed difficulty.