Lightweight Structure in Text
Robert C. Miller · 2002
Pattern matching is very useful in automatic text processing, for searching, filtering, and transforming text. Existing pattern languages, such as regular expressions and grammars, offer few opportunities for reuse. Lightweight structure is a new approach that solves the reuse problem. Lightweight structure has three parts: a model of text structure as contiguous segments of text, or regions; an extensible library of structure abstractions (e.g., HTML elements, Java expressions, or English sentences) that can be implemented by any kind of pattern or parser; and a region algebra that allows structure abstractions to be composed and reused. Lightweight structure does for text pattern matching what procedure abstraction does for programming, enabling the construction of a reusable pattern library.