parsing (n.)

In TRADITIONAL GRAMMAR, this term refers to the pedagogical exercise of labelling the grammatical ELEMENTS of single SENTENCES, e.g. SUBJECT, PREDICATE, past TENSE, NOUN, VERB; in the USA, also called diagramming. LINGUISTICS, by contrast, is less concerned with labels, and more with the criteria of analysis which lead to the identification of these elements, and with the way in which speakers use these elements to relate sentences in the LANGUAGE as a whole.

Modern grammatical FORMALISMS have begun to develop the properties of several parsing mechanisms (parsers), and the notion of parsing has proved to be central to work in COMPUTATIONAL LINGUISTICS, especially NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING.

The term parse identifies a central feature of the procedures of NETWORK GRAMMARS, where it refers to the grammatical breakdown of a TEXT (a ‘parse’) in terms of SYNTACTIC, SEMANTIC and REFERENTIAL information, as presented in the form of a parse tree.