Context-free language theory is a well-established area of mathematics, relevant to computer science foundations and technology. This paper presents the preliminary results of an ongoing formalization project using context-free grammars and the Coq proof assistant. The results obtained so far include the representation of context-free grammars, the description of algorithms for some operations on them (union, concatenation and closure) and the proof of related theorems (e.g. the correctness of these algorithms). A brief survey of related works is presented, as well as plans for further development.
Context-free grammar simplification is a subject of high importance in computer language processing technology as well as in formal language theory. This paper presents a formalization, using the Coq proof assistant, of the fact that general context-free grammars generate languages that can be also generated by simpler and equivalent context-free grammars. Namely, useless symbol elimination, inaccessible symbol elimination, unit rules elimination and empty rules elimination operations were described and proven correct with respect to the preservation of the language generated by the original g…
Hyperedge replacement (HR) grammars can generate NP-complete graph languages, which makes parsing hard even for fixed HR languages. Therefore, we study predictive shift-reduce (PSR) parsing that yields efficient parsers for a subclass of HR grammars, by generalizing the concepts of SLR(1) string parsing to graphs. We formalize the construction of PSR parsers and show that it is correct. PSR parsers run in linear space and time, and are more efficient than the predictive top-down (PTD) parsers recently developed by the authors.
Context-free language theory is a subject of high importance in computer language processing technology as well as in formal language theory. This paper presents a formalization, using the Coq proof assistant, of fundamental results related to context-free grammars and languages. These include closure properties (union, concatenation and Kleene star), grammar simplification (elimination of useless symbols inaccessible symbols, empty rules and unit rules) and the existence of a Chomsky Normal Form for context-free grammars.
The paper demonstrates the non-closure of the family of unambiguous linear languages (that is, those defined by unambiguous linear context-free grammars) under complementation. To be precise, a particular unambiguous linear grammar is presented, and it is proved that the complement of this language is not defined by any context-free grammar. This also constitutes an alternative proof for the result of Hibbard and Ullian ("The independence of inherent ambiguity from complementedness among context-free languages", J.ACM, 1966) on the non-closure of the unambiguous languages under complementation…
Proof assistants are software-based tools that are used in the mechanization of proof construction and validation in mathematics and computer science, and also in certified program development. Different tools are being increasingly used in order to accelerate and simplify proof checking. Context-free language theory is a well-established area of mathematics, relevant to computer science foundations and technology. This proposal aims at formalizing parts of context-free language theory in the Coq proof assistant. This report presents the underlying theory and general characteristics of proof a…
Most scripting languages nowadays use regex pattern-matching libraries. These regex libraries borrow the syntax of regular expressions, but have an informal semantics that is different from the semantics of regular expressions, removing the commutativity of alternation and adding ad-hoc extensions that cannot be expressed by formalisms for efficient recognition of regular languages, such as deterministic finite automata. Parsing Expression Grammars are a formalism that can describe all deterministic context-free languages and has a simple computational model. In this paper, we present a formal…
This paper presents a restricted form of linear indexed grammars, called even linear indexed grammars, which yield the even linear indexed languages. These languages properly contain the context-free languages and are contained in the set of linear indexed languages. We show that several patterns found in natural languages are also generated by these grammars, including crossing dependencies, copying, and multiple agreements. We discuss the learning problem for even linear indexed languages and show that it is reducible to that of the context-free languages. The closure properties for this cla…
In 2018, it was shown that all finitely generated virtually Abelian groups have multiple context-free word problems, and it is still an open problem as to where to precisely place the word problems of hyperbolic groups in the formal language hierarchy. Motivated by this, we introduce a new language class, the parallel hyperedge replacement string languages, containing all multiple context-free and ET0L languages. We show that parallel hyperedge replacement grammars can be "synchronised", which allows us to establish many useful formal language closure results relating to both the hypergraph an…
The downward closure of a language is the set of all (not necessarily contiguous) subwords of its members. It is well-known that the downward closure of every language is regular. Moreover, recent results show that downward closures are computable for quite powerful system models. One advantage of abstracting a language by its downward closure is that then equivalence and inclusion become decidable. In this work, we study the complexity of these two problems. More precisely, we consider the following decision problems: Given languages $K$ and $L$ from classes $\mathcal{C}$ and $\mathcal{D}$, r…
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…
Back in the 80s, the class of mildly context-sensitive formalisms was introduced so as to capture the syntax of natural languages. While the languages generated by such formalisms are constrained by the constant-growth property, the most well-known and used mildly-context sensitive formalisms, like tree-adjoining grammars or multiple context-free grammars, generate languages which verify the stronger property of being semilinear. In (Bourreau et al., 2012), the operation of IO-ubstitution was created so as to exhibit mildly context-sensitive classes of languages which are not semilinear, altho…
Operator precedence grammars define a classical Boolean and deterministic context-free 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. We introduce here Floyd automata, an equivalent operational formalism for defining FLs. This also permits to extend the class to deal with infinite strings to perform for instance model checking.
We present an extension of System F with higher-order context-free session types. The mixture of functional types with session types has proven to be a challenge for type equivalence formalization: whereas functional type equivalence is often rule-based, session type equivalence usually follows a semantic approach based on bisimulations. We propose a unifying approach that handles the equivalence of functional and session types together. We present three notions of type equivalence: a syntactic rule-based version, a semantic bisimulation-based version, and an algorithmic version by reduction t…
We present an underapproximation for context-free languages by filtering out runs of the underlying pushdown automaton depending on how the stack height evolves over time. In particular, we assign to each run a number quantifying the oscillating behavior of the stack along the run. We study languages accepted by pushdown automata restricted to k-oscillating runs. We relate oscillation on pushdown automata with a counterpart restriction on context-free grammars. We also provide a way to filter all but the k-oscillating runs from a given PDA by annotating stack symbols with information about the…
