Abstract:Context-Sensitive graph grammars are formal tools used for specifying visual languages. In order to intuitively describe and parse visual languages, current research has stressed the formalisms and algorithms of graph grammars, but has neglected the comparison of their expressiveness. Based on the analysis and induction of the key characteristics of context-sensitive graph grammar, the relationships between their expressiveness are uncovered and proved in this paper by constructing formalism-transforming algorithms. Moreover, the proposed algorithms correlate with these formalisms; thus, facilitating the usage of context-sensitive graph grammars, as alternative formalisms rather than merely one can be chosen to separately specify and parse visual objects in applications.