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Related papers: From Regexes to Parsing Expression Grammars

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Results of computational complexity exist for a wide range of phrase structure-based grammar formalisms, while there is an apparent lack of such results for dependency-based formalisms. We here adapt a result on the complexity of…

cmp-lg · Computer Science 2008-02-03 Peter Neuhaus , Norbert Broeker

This paper proposes an extension to classical regular expressions by the addition of two operators allowing the inclusion of boolean formulae from the zeroth order logic. These expressions are called constrained expressions. The associated…

Formal Languages and Automata Theory · Computer Science 2015-10-09 Jean-Marc Champarnaud , Ludovic Mignot , Florent Nicart

We analyse the expressiveness of the two-valued semantics of abstract argumentation frameworks, normal logic programs and abstract dialectical frameworks. By expressiveness we mean the ability to encode a desired set of two-valued…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2014-05-06 Hannes Strass

Historically, true context-sensitive parsing has seldom been applied to programming languages, due to its inherent complexity. However, many mainstream programming and markup languages (C, Haskell, Python, XML, and more) possess…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2016-09-20 Nicolas Laurent , Kim Mens

Recent work has shown that the computations of Transformers can be simulated in the RASP family of programming languages. These findings have enabled improved understanding of the expressive capacity and generalization abilities of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Xinting Huang , Aleksandra Bakalova , Satwik Bhattamishra , William Merrill , Michael Hahn

Reduction-based interpreters are traditionally defined in terms of a one-step reduction function which systematically decomposes a term into a potential redex and context, contracts the redex, and recomposes it to construct the new term to…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2025-08-18 Casper Bach

We present a model of pragmatic language understanding, where utterances are produced and understood by searching for regularized equilibria of signaling games. In this model (which we call ReCo, for Regularized Conventions), speakers and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-11-17 Athul Paul Jacob , Gabriele Farina , Jacob Andreas

Classic grammars and regular expressions can be used for a variety of purposes, including parsing, intent detection, and matching. However, the comparisons are performed at a structural level, with constituent elements (words or characters)…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2018-08-16 David Wingate , William Myers , Nancy Fulda , Tyler Etchart

Composing regexes is a common but challenging engineering activity. Software engineers struggle with regex complexity, leading to defects, performance issues, and security vulnerabilities. Researchers have proposed tools to synthesize…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-09-25 Berk Çakar , Charles M. Sale , Sophie Chen , Dongyoon Lee , James C. Davis

Referring expression generation (REG) algorithms offer computational models of the production of referring expressions. In earlier work, a corpus of referring expressions (REs) in Mandarin was introduced. In the present paper, we annotate…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-08-17 Guanyi Chen , Kees van Deemter

Parsing Expression Grammars (PEGs) are a formalism used to describe top-down parsers with backtracking. As PEGs do not provide a good error recovery mechanism, PEG-based parsers usually do not recover from syntax errors in the input, or…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2018-07-02 Sérgio Medeiros , Fabio Mascarenhas

Semantic parsers convert natural language to logical forms, which can be evaluated on knowledge bases (KBs) to produce denotations. Recent semantic parsers have been developed with sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) pre-trained language models…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-01 Daehwan Nam , Gary Geunbae Lee

A recent paper by Drewes, Hoffmann, and Minas (GCM 2023 proceedings) has shown that certain graph languages can be defined and efficiently recognized by finite automata when strings over typed symbols are interpreted as graphs. This…

Formal Languages and Automata Theory · Computer Science 2025-03-27 Mattia De Rosa , Mark Minas

Algorithms like those for differentiating functional expressions manipulate the syntactic structure of mathematical expressions in a mathematically meaningful way. A formalization of such an algorithm should include a specification of its…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2013-08-06 William M. Farmer

We present the first mechanized, succinct, practical, complete, and proven-faithful semantics for a modern regular expression language with backtracking semantics. We ensure its faithfulness by proving it equivalent to a preexisting…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2026-04-08 Aurèle Barrière , Victor Deng , Clément Pit-Claudel

We investigate the expressive power of regular expressions for languages of countable words and establish their expressive equivalence with logical and algebraic characterizations. Our goal is to extend the classical theory of regular…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2025-05-05 Thomas Colcombet , A V Sreejith

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…

cmp-lg · Computer Science 2008-02-03 Fernando C. N. Pereira , Rebecca N. Wright

Most expressivity results for transformers treat them as language recognizers -- devices that accept or reject strings -- rather than as they are used in practice: as language models that generate strings autoregressively and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Andy Yang , Anej Svete , Jiaoda Li , Anthony Widjaja Lin , Jonathan Rawski , Ryan Cotterell , David Chiang

Semantic parsing aims at translating natural language (NL) utterances onto machine-interpretable programs, which can be executed against a real-world environment. The expensive annotation of utterance-program pairs has long been…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-04-14 Bailin Wang , Mirella Lapata , Ivan Titov

Matching regexes (regular expressions) is a common problem in many areas of computer science, with requirements on high speed and robust performance. Regexes with backreferences allow one to express certain patterns (even beyond regular)…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2026-04-16 Vojtěch Havlena , Lukáš Holík , Ondřej Lengál , Jan Vašák , Sabína Gulčíková