Understanding Context-free Grammars through Data Visualization

Abstract: Ever since the late 1950's, context-free grammars have played an important role within the field of linguistics, been a part of introductory courses and expanded into other fields of study. Meanwhile, data visualization in modern web development has made it possible to do feature rich visualization in the browser. In this thesis, these two developments are united, by developing a browser based app, to write context-free grammars, parse sentences and visualize the output. A user experience study with usability-tests and user-interviews is conducted, in order to investigate the possible benefits and disadvantages of said visualization when writing context-free grammars. The results show that data visualization was limitedly used by participants, in that it helped them to see if sentences were parsed and, if a sentence was not parsed, at which position parsing went wrong. Future improvements on the software and studies on them are proposed as well as the expansion of the field of data visualization within linguistics.