This paper describes a transduction language suitable for natural language treebank transformations and motivates its application to tasks that have been used and described in the literature. The language, which is the basis for a tree transduction tool allows for clean, precise and concise description of what has been very confusingly, ambiguously, and incompletely textually described in the literature also allowing easy non-hard-coded implementation. We also aim at getting feedback from the NLP community to eventually converge to a de facto standard for such transduction language.

We describe an LR parser of parts-of-speech (and punctuation labels) for Tree Adjoining Grammars (TAGs), that solves table conflicts in a greedy way, with limited amount of backtracking. We evaluate the parser using the Penn Treebank showing that the method yield very fast parsers with at least reasonable accuracy, confirming the intuition that LR parsing benefits from the use of rich grammars.