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 edit

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 edit

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 edit

References edit

  1. ^ Cohn, Trevor; Blunsom, Phil (2009). "A Bayesian model of syntax-directed tree to string grammar induction". Proceedings of the 2009 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing Volume 1 – EMNLP '09. Vol. 1. Morristown, NJ, USA: Association for Computational Linguistics. pp. 352–361. doi:10.3115/1699510.1699557. ISBN 978-1-932432-59-6. S2CID 2785745.
  2. ^ Salkoff, M.; Sager, N. (1967). "The elimination of grammatical restrictions in a string grammar of English". Proceedings of the 1967 conference on Computational linguistics. pp. 1–15. doi:10.3115/991566.991582. S2CID 12583235.
  3. ^ Salkoff, Morris (1999). A French-English Grammar: A Contrastive Grammar on Translational Principles. Lingvisticæ Investigationes Supplementa. Vol. 22. p. 12. doi:10.1075/lis.22. ISBN 978-90-272-3131-4.
  4. ^ "Programming in Apache Qpid: 2.4.4. Address String Grammar". Red Hat Customer Portal. Retrieved 2019-10-01.
  5. ^ "Variable Typing (The GNU Awk User's Guide)". GNU.org. Retrieved 2019-10-01.