A Context-free Markup Language for Semi-structured Text

An ad hoc data format is any non-standard, semi-structured data format for which robust data processing tools are not available. In this paper, we present ANNE, a new kind of mark-up language designed to help users generate documentation and data processing tools for ad hoc text data. More specifically, given a new ad hoc data source, an ANNE programmer will edit the document to add a number of simple annotations, which serve to specify its syntactic structure. Annotations include elements that specify constants, optional data, alternatives, enumerations, sequences, tabular data, and recursive patterns. The ANNE system uses a combination of user annotations and the raw data itself to extract a context-free grammar from the document. This context-free grammar can then be used to parse the data and transform it into an XML parse tree, which may be viewed through a browser for analysis or debugging purposes. In addition, the ANNE system will generate a PADS/ML description [21], which may...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: PLDI
• Authors: Qian Xi, David Walker
• Keywords: Ad Hoc Data, Data Processing Tools, Hoc Data Format, PLDI 2010, Programming Languages