Syntactic Recognition of Imperfectly Specified Patterns

The methods developed in this correspondence represent an approach to the problem of handling error-corrupted syntactic pattern strings, an area generally neglected in the numerous techniques for linguistic pattern description and recognition which have been reported. The basic approach consists of applying error transformations to the productions of context-free grammars in order to generate new grammars (also context-free) capable of describing not only the original error-free patterns, but also patterns containing specific types of errors such as deleted, added, and interchanged symbols which arise often in the pattern-scanning process. Theoretical developments are illustrated in the framework of a syntactic recognition system for chromosome structures.