String grammar explained

The term "string grammar" in computational linguistics (and computer languages) refers to the structure of a specific language, such that it can be formatted as a single continuous string of text,[1] without the need to have line-breaks (or newlines) to alter the meaning. The appearance of any text in "column 1" (or any column) of a line does not change the meaning of that text in a string grammar. A string grammar can be used to describe the structure of some natural languages, such as English or French,[2] [3] as well as for some computer languages.

Note that the string-based structure is for defining the grammar of a language, rather than the formatting of the language itself. The production rules, of the grammar, are in the form of continuous text strings.

Benefits of using a string grammar

When a string grammar is used to define a computer language, some string-grammar parsing tools and compiler-generator tools can be used to more easily create a compiler software system for that particular computer language. Because other grammars can be more difficult to use for parsing text written in a specific computer language, using a string grammar is a means to seek simplicity in language processing.

Unrelated terms that may be confused

Sometimes the word "string" precedes "grammar" in unrelated terms. An example is "address string grammar", which is a grammar for Internet Protocol address strings.[4] Another is the term "numeric string grammar" which refers to numeric strings (strings which denote numbers or numerals).[5]

See also

Notes and References

  1. Book: A Bayesian model of syntax-directed tree to string grammar induction . Trevor . Cohn . Proceedings of the 2009 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing Volume 1 – EMNLP '09 . Association for Computational Linguistics . Blunsom . Phil . 2009 . 1 . Morristown, NJ, USA . 352–361 . 978-1-932432-59-6 . 10.3115/1699510.1699557. 2785745 .
  2. Book: The elimination of grammatical restrictions in a string grammar of English . M. . Salkoff . Proceedings of the 1967 conference on Computational linguistics . Sager . N. . 1967 . 1–15 . 10.3115/991566.991582. 12583235 .
  3. Book: Morris . Salkoff . A French-English Grammar: A Contrastive Grammar on Translational Principles . Lingvisticæ Investigationes Supplementa . 1999 . 22 . 12 . 978-90-272-3131-4 . 10.1075/lis.22.
  4. Web site: Programming in Apache Qpid: 2.4.4. Address String Grammar . Red Hat Customer Portal . 2019-10-01.
  5. Web site: 2019-10-01 . Variable Typing (The GNU Awk User's Guide) . GNU.org.