CODEWITHSUNDEEP
rubyregexparsinggrammar
MrVocabulary
MrVocabulary

Reputation: 655

Grammar parsing in Ruby

I have a task ahead of me which relies on interpreting structure of a text – to be precise, a monolingual dictionary. The dictionary has quite complex entries: up to 29 unique elements, and some are nested within others. I am designing my own XML schema for the dictionary, but I would like to write a program that parses the plain text I have automatically.

I have some basic skills in Ruby and I am a rather experienced RegEx user, but I think creating lots of if-trees and extremely long RegEx formulas is prboably not the best idea. I have found some information on Parsing Expression Grammar, Backus Normal Form and W-grammar, but it seems somewhat vague to what they apply best.

My question is: which is best way to interpret the structure of a text written in a natural language? I don't want to interpret the language itself, but rather to divide each entry into segments based on characters and keyword used, as well as their neighborhood. What gems and resources would you suggest?

Edit: here's an example of a moderately simple entry from the dictionary (in Polish). What I want to do is to tag each element (senses, explanations, collocation, label markers etc.). As you can see, I am looking for an efficient way to encompass a large number of cases in a tree-like form. Another problem is that I want to have lots of captures, as I want to tag the segments in XML from bigger to smaller.

Upvotes: 3

Views: 413

Answers (1)

gymbrall
gymbrall

Reputation: 2063

This looks like a problem that would be well suited for Treetop. I don't think I have enough information to be sure that it will work, but being able to combine regular expressions into a larger structure where each of the 29 elements can be managed and their information extracted/represented using any of Ruby's features as appropriate, seems like the sort of feature set you need.

Upvotes: 1

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