5,868 research outputs found
Operator Precedence Languages: Their Automata-Theoretic and Logic Characterization
Operator precedence languages were introduced half a century ago by Robert Floyd to support deterministic and efficient parsing of context-free languages. Recently, we renewed our interest in this class of languages thanks to a few distinguishing properties that make them attractive for exploiting various modern technologies. Precisely, their local parsability enables parallel and incremental parsing, whereas their closure properties make them amenable to automatic verification techniques, including model checking. In this paper we provide a fairly complete theory of this class of languages: we introduce a class of automata with the same recognizing power as the generative power of their grammars; we provide a characterization of their sentences in terms of monadic second-order logic as has been done in previous literature for more restricted language classes such as regular, parenthesis, and input-driven ones; we investigate preserved and lost properties when extending the language sentences from finite length to infinite length (-languages). As a result, we obtain a class of languages that enjoys many of the nice properties of regular languages (closure and decidability properties, logic characterization) but is considerably larger than other families---typically parenthesis and input-driven ones---with the same properties, covering “almost” all deterministic languages
Logic Characterization of Invisibly Structured Languages: The Case of Floyd Languages
Operator precedence grammars define a classical Boolean and deterministic context-free language family (called Floyd languages or FLs). FLs have been shown to strictly include the well-known Visibly Pushdown Languages, and enjoy the same nice closure properties. In this paper we provide a complete characterization of FLs in terms of a suitable Monadic Second-Order Logic. Traditional approaches to logic characterization of formal languages refer explicitly to the structures over which they are interpreted - e.g, trees or graphs - or to strings that are isomorphic to the structure, as in parenthesis languages. In the case of FLs, instead, the syntactic structure of input strings is “invisible” and must be reconstructed through parsing. This requires that logic formulae encode some typical context-free parsing actions, such as shift-reduce ones
Formal Properties of XML Grammars and Languages
XML documents are described by a document type definition (DTD). An
XML-grammar is a formal grammar that captures the syntactic features of a DTD.
We investigate properties of this family of grammars. We show that every
XML-language basically has a unique XML-grammar. We give two characterizations
of languages generated by XML-grammars, one is set-theoretic, the other is by a
kind of saturation property. We investigate decidability problems and prove
that some properties that are undecidable for general context-free languages
become decidable for XML-languages. We also characterize those XML-grammars
that generate regular XML-languages.Comment: 24 page
Generalizing input-driven languages: theoretical and practical benefits
Regular languages (RL) are the simplest family in Chomsky's hierarchy. Thanks
to their simplicity they enjoy various nice algebraic and logic properties that
have been successfully exploited in many application fields. Practically all of
their related problems are decidable, so that they support automatic
verification algorithms. Also, they can be recognized in real-time.
Context-free languages (CFL) are another major family well-suited to
formalize programming, natural, and many other classes of languages; their
increased generative power w.r.t. RL, however, causes the loss of several
closure properties and of the decidability of important problems; furthermore
they need complex parsing algorithms. Thus, various subclasses thereof have
been defined with different goals, spanning from efficient, deterministic
parsing to closure properties, logic characterization and automatic
verification techniques.
Among CFL subclasses, so-called structured ones, i.e., those where the
typical tree-structure is visible in the sentences, exhibit many of the
algebraic and logic properties of RL, whereas deterministic CFL have been
thoroughly exploited in compiler construction and other application fields.
After surveying and comparing the main properties of those various language
families, we go back to operator precedence languages (OPL), an old family
through which R. Floyd pioneered deterministic parsing, and we show that they
offer unexpected properties in two fields so far investigated in totally
independent ways: they enable parsing parallelization in a more effective way
than traditional sequential parsers, and exhibit the same algebraic and logic
properties so far obtained only for less expressive language families
Algebraic properties of structured context-free languages: old approaches and novel developments
The historical research line on the algebraic properties of structured CF
languages initiated by McNaughton's Parenthesis Languages has recently
attracted much renewed interest with the Balanced Languages, the Visibly
Pushdown Automata languages (VPDA), the Synchronized Languages, and the
Height-deterministic ones. Such families preserve to a varying degree the basic
algebraic properties of Regular languages: boolean closure, closure under
reversal, under concatenation, and Kleene star. We prove that the VPDA family
is strictly contained within the Floyd Grammars (FG) family historically known
as operator precedence. Languages over the same precedence matrix are known to
be closed under boolean operations, and are recognized by a machine whose pop
or push operations on the stack are purely determined by terminal letters. We
characterize VPDA's as the subclass of FG having a peculiarly structured set of
precedence relations, and balanced grammars as a further restricted case. The
non-counting invariance property of FG has a direct implication for VPDA too.Comment: Extended version of paper presented at WORDS2009, Salerno,Italy,
September 200
Higher-Order Operator Precedence Languages
Floyd's Operator Precedence (OP) languages are a deterministic context-free
family having many desirable properties. They are locally and parallely
parsable, and languages having a compatible structure are closed under Boolean
operations, concatenation and star; they properly include the family of Visibly
Pushdown (or Input Driven) languages. OP languages are based on three relations
between any two consecutive terminal symbols, which assign syntax structure to
words. We extend such relations to k-tuples of consecutive terminal symbols, by
using the model of strictly locally testable regular languages of order k at
least 3. The new corresponding class of Higher-order Operator Precedence
languages (HOP) properly includes the OP languages, and it is still included in
the deterministic (also in reverse) context free family. We prove Boolean
closure for each subfamily of structurally compatible HOP languages. In each
subfamily, the top language is called max-language. We show that such languages
are defined by a simple cancellation rule and we prove several properties, in
particular that max-languages make an infinite hierarchy ordered by parameter
k. HOP languages are a candidate for replacing OP languages in the various
applications where they have have been successful though sometimes too
restrictive.Comment: In Proceedings AFL 2017, arXiv:1708.0622
Recognizing well-parenthesized expressions in the streaming model
Motivated by a concrete problem and with the goal of understanding the sense
in which the complexity of streaming algorithms is related to the complexity of
formal languages, we investigate the problem Dyck(s) of checking matching
parentheses, with different types of parenthesis.
We present a one-pass randomized streaming algorithm for Dyck(2) with space
\Order(\sqrt{n}\log n), time per letter \polylog (n), and one-sided error.
We prove that this one-pass algorithm is optimal, up to a \polylog n factor,
even when two-sided error is allowed. For the lower bound, we prove a direct
sum result on hard instances by following the "information cost" approach, but
with a few twists. Indeed, we play a subtle game between public and private
coins. This mixture between public and private coins results from a balancing
act between the direct sum result and a combinatorial lower bound for the base
case.
Surprisingly, the space requirement shrinks drastically if we have access to
the input stream in reverse. We present a two-pass randomized streaming
algorithm for Dyck(2) with space \Order((\log n)^2), time \polylog (n) and
one-sided error, where the second pass is in the reverse direction. Both
algorithms can be extended to Dyck(s) since this problem is reducible to
Dyck(2) for a suitable notion of reduction in the streaming model.Comment: 20 pages, 5 figure
The Word Problem for Omega-Terms over the Trotter-Weil Hierarchy
For two given -terms and , the word problem for
-terms over a variety asks whether
in all monoids in . We show that the
word problem for -terms over each level of the Trotter-Weil Hierarchy
is decidable. More precisely, for every fixed variety in the Trotter-Weil
Hierarchy, our approach yields an algorithm in nondeterministic logarithmic
space (NL). In addition, we provide deterministic polynomial time algorithms
which are more efficient than straightforward translations of the
NL-algorithms. As an application of our results, we show that separability by
the so-called corners of the Trotter-Weil Hierarchy is witnessed by
-terms (this property is also known as -reducibility). In
particular, the separation problem for the corners of the Trotter-Weil
Hierarchy is decidable
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