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Formal language

About: Formal language is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 5763 publications have been published within this topic receiving 154114 citations.


Papers
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Proceedings ArticleDOI
26 Mar 2014
TL;DR: A study in which 15 programmers with various expertise read short source codes and recorded their eye movements shows that most attention is oriented towards understanding of identifiers, operators, keywords and literals, relatively little reading time is spent on separators.
Abstract: While knowledge about reading behavior in natural-language text is abundant, little is known about the visual attention distribution when reading source code of computer programs. Yet, this knowledge is important for teaching programming skills as well as designing IDEs and programming languages. We conducted a study in which 15 programmers with various expertise read short source codes and recorded their eye movements. In order to study attention distribution on code elements, we introduced the following procedure: First we (pre)-processed the eye movement data using log-transformation. Taking into account the word lengths, we then analyzed the time spent on different lexical elements. It shows that most attention is oriented towards understanding of identifiers, operators, keywords and literals, relatively little reading time is spent on separators. We further inspected the attention on keywords and provide a description of the gaze on these primary building blocks for any formal language. The analysis indicates that approaches from research on natural-language text reading can be applied to source code as well, however not without review.

35 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: A new formalism for representation of finite languages, referred to as the class of IDL-expressions, is proposed, which combines concepts that were only considered in isolation in existing formalisms and is compared with more standard ones.
Abstract: We propose a formalism for representation of finite languages, referred to as the class of IDL-expressions, which combines concepts that were only considered in isolation in existing formalisms. The suggested applications are in natural language processing, more specifically in surface natural language generation and in machine translation, where a sentence is obtained by first generating a large set of candidate sentences, represented in a compact way, and then filtering such a set through a parser. We study several formal properties of IDL-expressions and compare this new formalism with more standard ones. We also present a novel parsing algorithm for IDL-expressions and prove a non-trivial upper bound on its time complexity.

35 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The specific study addresses the issue of distance learning forum modelling using a formal language, aiming to fill the gap that exists in this area, which is demonstrated by the relevant bibliographic review.
Abstract: This article presents a study carried out in the area of distance learning electronic forums. Based on the relevant bibliographic review, electronic forums are increasingly becoming part of the learning process. The specific study was stimulated by previous works relevant to the modelling of the behaviour of IT students at Hellenic Open University (HOU) and addresses the issue of distance learning forum modelling using a formal language, aiming to fill the gap that exists in this area, which is demonstrated by the relevant bibliographic review. For this purpose: (a) a relevant note was submitted to HOU's forums, (b) the main concepts of formal languages were specified, (c) a formal language was created which was specified using mathematical terms and represents the messages of HOU's forum, (d) the correctness of such language was verified using specific examples of its function, (e) a language syntactic check algorithm was designed, (f) the parameters impacting on the effectiveness of a distance learning forum were determined, (g) concepts such as time, group size and volume of information were incorporated into the language and (h) efforts were made to identify the factors impacting on the effectiveness of a distance learning forum and the following concepts were incorporated: time, group size and volume of information, in the language.

34 citations

Book
01 Jan 1995

34 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This work establishes a formal connection between Lindstrom quantifiers with respect to regular languages and the double semidirect product of finite monoids with a distinguished set of generators and uses this correspondence to characterize the expressive power of Lindstromquantifiers associated with a class of regular languages.
Abstract: In our main result, we establish a formal connection between Lindstrom quantifiers with respect to regular languages and the double semidirect product of finite monoids with a distinguished set of generators. We use this correspondence to characterize the expressive power of Lindstrom quantifiers associated with a class of regular languages.

34 citations


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Performance
Metrics
No. of papers in the topic in previous years
YearPapers
20237
202237
2021113
2020175
2019173
2018142