Which failure mode becomes likely when applying a recursive descent parsing algorithm to a grammar with left recursion in a computational linguistics system?

💡 Explanation

Left recursion can cause a recursive descent parser to infinitely call the same rule, because the parser will attempt to expand the leftmost non-terminal without consuming any input. Therefore, an infinite loop is a likely failure mode, rather than stack overflow due to excessive backtracking, which can occur with other parsing strategies.

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