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Relation Grammars: A Formalism for Syntactic and Semantic Analysis of Visual Languages

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Visual Language Theory

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Abstract

Formal grammars have been widely used for the formal description of visual languages and for the implementation of general lexical analyzers, parsers, semantic analyzers, syntax-driven visual programming environments, etc. This chapter analyzes the formalism ofsymbol relation grammarsand compares its features with the ones of other existing models. In this formalism each sentence is composed of a set ofsymbol occurrencesrepresenting visual elementary objects, which are related through a set of binaryrelational items.The main feature of symbol relation grammars is the uniform way they use context-free productions to rewrite symbol occurrences as well as relational items. The clearness and uniformity of the derivation process for symbol relation grammars allows syntactic tree structures to be easily defined as a natural extension of the traditional syntactic trees of context-free string grammars. The main application of these structures is to extend well established techniques of syntactic and semantic analysis to the case of symbol relation grammars and prove properties of their derivation process.

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Authors
  1. Filomena Ferrucci
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  2. Genny Tortora
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  3. Maurizio Tucci
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  4. Giuliana Vitiello
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, Monash University, Clayton, Victoria, 3168, Australia

    Kim Marriott

  2. Lehr und Forschungseinrichtung für Programmierung und Softwaretechnik Institut für Informatik, Ludwig Maximillians Universität, Oettingenstrasse 67, Munich, 80538, Germany

    Bernd Meyer

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Ferrucci, F., Tortora, G., Tucci, M., Vitiello, G. (1998). Relation Grammars: A Formalism for Syntactic and Semantic Analysis of Visual Languages. In: Marriott, K., Meyer, B. (eds) Visual Language Theory. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-1676-6_7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-1676-6_7

  • Publisher Name: Springer, New York, NY

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-4612-7240-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-4612-1676-6

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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