Building syntax-aware editors for visual languages

In this work, we present a strategy for the automatic generation of syntax-aware visual language editors integrating incremental subsentence parsers into freehand editors. The proposed parsing strategy has turned out to be useful in many application domains involving spatial information systems, thanks to the possibility of interactively prompting feasible visual sentence extensions, and to the presence of a non-correcting error recovery strategy. A first experimental prototype implementing the whole approach has been embedded into the VLDesk system, and empirical studies have been performed in order to verify the performance and the effectiveness of the proposed approach.