Parsing

The parsing process of an AGFL-parser involves two stages:

1.

lexical analysis

2.

syntactic analysis

The results of the lexical analysis, which uses all terminal symbols (syntax terminals and regular expressions) from the lexicon and the grammar, are a lexical graph. This lexical graph is the input to the syntactic analysis, which uses the rules defined in the grammar.

AGFL-parsers are usually line parsers, i.e. they expect each input (e.g. a sentence) to be formatted on exactly one line of input. Furthermore, AGFL is case-sensitive, i.e. capitals are distinguished from their lowercase variants.

This chapter will first explain lexical analysis. After that the syntactic analysis will be treated.