Editing Parsing (section)

{{short description|Analysing a string of symbols, according to the rules of a formal grammar}}
{{redirect|Parse}}
'''Parsing''', '''syntax analysis''', or '''syntactic analysis''' is a process of analyzing a [[String (computer science)|string]] of [[Symbol (formal)|symbols]], either in [[natural language]], [[computer languages]] or [[data structure]]s, conforming to the rules of a [[formal grammar]] by breaking it into parts. The term ''parsing'' comes from Latin ''pars'' (''orationis''), meaning [[Part of speech|part (of speech)]].<ref name="dictionary.com">{{cite web |url=https://www.dictionary.com/browse/parse |title=Parse|publisher=dictionary.reference.com |access-date=27 November 2010}}</ref>

The term has slightly different meanings in different branches of [[linguistics]] and [[computer science]]. Traditional [[Sentence (linguistics)|sentence]] parsing is often performed as a method of understanding the exact meaning of a sentence or word, sometimes with the aid of devices such as [[sentence diagram]]s. It usually emphasizes the importance of grammatical divisions such as [[subject (grammar)|subject]] and [[predicate (grammar)|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 [[Semantics|semantic]] information.{{citation needed|date=August 2019}} Some parsing algorithms generate a ''parse forest'' or list of parse trees from a string that is [[syntactic ambiguity|syntactically ambiguous]].<ref name="Tomita2012">{{cite book|author=Masaru Tomita|title=Generalized LR Parsing|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=VVDTBwAAQBAJ&q=%22parse+forest%22|date=6 December 2012|publisher=Springer Science & Business Media|isbn=978-1-4615-4034-2}}</ref>

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."<ref name="dictionary.com" /> This term is especially common when discussing which linguistic cues help speakers interpret [[garden path sentence|garden-path sentences]].

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 [[interpreter (computing)|interpreters]]. The term may also be used to describe a split or separation.

In data analysis, the term is often used to refer to a process extracting desired information from data, e.g., creating a [[time series]] signal from a [[XML]] document.