Work

Detecting and Explaining (In-)equivalence of Context-Free Grammars

Year: 2025

Type: article

Abstract: We propose a scalable framework for deciding, proving, and explaining (in-)equivalence of context-free grammars. We present an implementation of the framework and evaluate it on large data sets collected within educational support systems. Even though the equivalence problem for context-free languages is undecidable in general, the framework is able to handle a large portion of these datasets. It introduces and combines techniques from several areas, such as an abstract grammar transformation language to identify equivalent grammars as well as sufficiently similar inequivalent grammars, theory-based comparison algorithms for a large class of context-free languages, and a graph-theory-inspired grammar canonization that allows to efficiently identify isomorphic grammars.

Source: Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages

DOI: 10.1145/3763156

Authors: Marko Schmellenkamp, Thomas Zeume, Sven Argo, Sandra Kiefer, Cedric Siems, Fynn Stebel

Institutions: Ruhr University Bochum, University of Oxford

Language: English

Topic: semigroups and automata theory

Subfield: Computational Theory and Mathematics

Field: Computer Science

Domain: Physical Sciences

Open Access status: diamond

Funder: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft

Award: Formale Grundlagen von Lernsystemen für die Theoretische Informatik