String grammar

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

References
  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.
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