Visual Language Parsing: If I Had a Hammer

Since the 1960s, grammatical formalisms and parsing methods developed originally for natural language strings have been extended to represent and process two-dimensional visual expressions such as mathematics notation and various kinds of diagrams. But despite all of the effort, there has been negligible impact on human-computer interfaces to support visual modes of communication. Why? As with all tech transfer issues, some of the reasons may be beyond a researcher's control. However, I believe that two of the contributing factors in the case of visual language (VL) parsing can and should be addressed by the research field. First, the field needs to consolidate and communicate its results. This is in fact not trivial for higher-dimensional visual language representation and parsing, and I will try to illustrate why. Second, researchers have to look harder for the right application domains. One of the obvious applications is the interpretation of visual language expressions constructed with GUIs. While grammatical representation and parsing may bring something to the table, the problem of interpretation may be solvable with simpler techniques. I will discuss some other application areas and my experience with them: design support, smart screen layout for electronic publishing, and visual focusing for attributed graphs.