Related papers: Enumerating regular expressions and their language…
Context-free grammars are not able to model cross-serial dependencies in natural languages. To overcome this issue, Seki et al. introduced a generalization called $m$-multiple context-free grammars ($m$-MCFGs), which deal with $m$-tuples of…
Given a partially-ordered finite alphabet $\Sigma$ and a language $L\subseteq \Sigma^*$, how large can an antichain in $L$ be (where $L$ is given the lexicographic ordering)? More precisely, since $L$ will in general be infinite, we should…
A standard informal method for analyzing the asymptotic complexity of a program is to extract a recurrence that describes its cost in terms of the size of its input, and then to compute a closed-form upper bound on that recurrence. We give…
We introduce a method to measure uncertainty in large language models. For tasks like question answering, it is essential to know when we can trust the natural language outputs of foundation models. We show that measuring uncertainty in…
The permutation language $P_n$ consists of all words that are permutations of a fixed alphabet of size $n$. Using divide-and-conquer, we construct a regular expression $R_n$ that specifies $P_n$. We then give explicit bounds for the length…
We study a deliberately simple, fully non-linguistic model of text: a sequence of independent draws from a finite alphabet of letters plus a single space symbol. A word is defined as a maximal block of non-space symbols. Within this…
An attractive mechanism to specify global constraints in rostering and other domains is via formal languages. For instance, the Regular and Grammar constraints specify constraints in terms of the languages accepted by an automaton and a…
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…
We study the task, for a given language $L$, of enumerating the (generally infinite) sequence of its words, without repetitions, while bounding the delay between two consecutive words. To allow for delay bounds that do not depend on the…
We study 4 problems in string matching, namely, regular expression matching, approximate regular expression matching, string edit distance, and subsequence indexing, on a standard word RAM model of computation that allows logarithmic-sized…
We consider languages generated by weighted context-free grammars. It is shown that the behaviour of large texts is controlled by saddle-point equations for an appropriate generating function. We then consider ensembles of grammars, in…
Indexed languages are a generalization of context-free languages and form a proper subset of context-sensitive languages. We propose to generalize to indexed languages several well known characterizations of context-free languages: namely,…
Let $\Sigma = X\cup X^{-1} = \{ x_1 ,x_2 ,..., x_m ,x_1^{-1} ,x_2^{-1} ,..., x_m^{-1} \}$ and let $G$ be a group with set of generators $\Sigma$. Let $\mathfrak{L} (G) =\left\{ \left. \omega \in \Sigma^* \; \right\vert \;\omega \equiv e \;…
Phrase-structure grammars are effective models for important syntactic and semantic aspects of natural languages, but can be computationally too demanding for use as language models in real-time speech recognition. Therefore, finite-state…
Many complex generative systems use languages to create structured objects. We consider a model of random languages, defined by weighted context-free grammars. As the distribution of grammar weights broadens, a transition is found from a…
We use the formulation of equilibrium statistical mechanics in order to study some important characteristics of language. Using a simple expression for the Hamiltonian of a language system, which is directly implied by the Zipf law, we are…
Let $S$ be a finite set, and $X_1,\ldots,X_n$ an i.i.d. uniform sample from $S$. To estimate the size $|S|$, without further structure, one can wait for repeats and use the birthday problem. This requires a sample size of the order…
We discuss inequalities holding between the vocabulary size, i.e., the number of distinct nonterminal symbols in a grammar-based compression for a string, and the excess length of the respective universal code, i.e., the code-based analog…
Two formalisms, both based on context-free grammars, have recently been proposed as a basis for a non-uniform random generation of combinatorial objects. The former, introduced by Denise et al, associates weights with letters, while the…
The equivalence problem for unambiguous grammars is an important, but very difficult open question in formal language theory. Consider the \emph{limited} equivalence problem for unambiguous grammars -- for two unambiguous grammars $G_1$ and…