Parsing

Parsing or syntactic analysis is the process of analysing a string of symbols, either in natural language or in computer languages, conforming to the rules of a formal grammar.

Description

The term parsing comes from Latin pars (orationis), meaning part (of speech).

The term has slightly different meanings in different branches of linguistics and computer science.

Traditional sentence parsing is often performed as a method of understanding the exact meaning of a sentence, sometimes with the aid of devices such as sentence diagrams.

It usually emphasizes the importance of grammatical divisions such as subject and predicate.

Within computational linguistics the term is used to refer to the formal analysis by a computer of a sentence or other string of words into its constituents, resulting in a parse tree showing their syntactic relation to each other, which may also contain semantic and other information.

The term is also used in psycholinguistics when describing language comprehension. In this context, parsing refers to the way that human beings analyze a sentence or phrase (in spoken language or text) "in terms of grammatical constituents, identifying the parts of speech, syntactic relations, etc."

Within computer science, the term is used in the analysis of computer languages, referring to the syntactic analysis of the input code into its component parts in order to facilitate the writing of compilers and interpreters.

See also

• Computer science
• TO DO: more cross references

External links

• Parsing @ Wikipedia