chart-parsing techniques and the prediction of valid editing moves in structured document authoring
We present an approach to controlled document authoring that significantly extends the functionality of existing methods by allowing bottom-up and top-down specifications to be freely mixed. A finite-state automaton is used to represent the partial, evolving, description of the document during authoring. Using a generalization of chart-parsing techniques to FSAs rather than fixed input strings, we show how the authoring system is able to automatically detect the consequences of the choices already made by the author so as to only propose for the next authoring steps choices which may provably lead to a globally valid document. We start by considering the case of authoring purely textual documents controlled by a context-free grammar, then show a generalization of this approach to structured documents controlled by a specification whose formal expressive power is at least that of Regular Hedge Grammars (closely related to RELAX NG Schemas) and therefore greater than that of DTDs.
document authoring tools and systems computational linguistics parsing xml