Related papers: Non-closure under complementation for unambiguous …
We consider languages defined by signed grammars which are similar to context-free grammars except productions with signs associated to them are allowed. As a consequence, the words generated also have signs. We use the structure of the…
Motivated by recent connections to factorised databases, we analyse the efficiency of representations by context free grammars (CFGs). Concretely, we prove a recent conjecture by Kimelfeld, Martens, and Niewerth (ICDT 2025), that for finite…
Indexed languages are a classical notion in formal language theory, which has attracted attention in recent decades due to its role in higher-order model checking: They are precisely the languages accepted by order-2 pushdown automata. The…
In this paper, we continue the research on the power of contextual grammars with selection languages from subfamilies of the family of regular languages. We investigate infix-, prefix-, and suffix-closed languages (referred to as…
We prove that there exists no algorithm to decide whether the language generated by a context-free grammar is dense with respect to the lexicographic ordering. As a corollary to this result, we show that it is undecidable whether the…
We continue the research on the generative capacity of contextual grammars where contexts are adjoined around whole words (externally) or around subwords (internally) which belong to special regular selection languages. All languages…
A common question when studying a class of context-free grammars is whether equivalence is decidable within this class. We answer this question positively for the class of Clark-congruential grammars, which are of interest to grammatical…
In this article, we provide three coalgebraic characterizations of the class of context-free languages, each based on the idea of adding coalgebraic structure to an existing algebraic structure by specifying output-derivative pairs. Final…
In this paper, we prove decidability properties and new results on the position of the family of languages generated by (circular) splicing systems within the Chomsky hierarchy. The two main results of the paper are the following. First, we…
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…
This work is a study of the expressive power of unambiguity in the case of automata over infinite trees. An automaton is called unambiguous if it has at most one accepting run on every input, the language of such an automaton is called an…
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…
Iterated hairpin completion is an operation on formal languages that is inspired by the hairpin formation in DNA biochemistry. Iterated hairpin completion of a word (or more precisely a singleton language) is always a context-sensitive…
We study the links between the topological complexity of an omega context free language and its degree of ambiguity. In particular, using known facts from classical descriptive set theory, we prove that non Borel omega context free…
For any context-free grammar, we build a transition diagram, that is, a finite directed graph with labeled arcs, which describes the work of the grammar. This approach is new, and it is different from previously known graph models. We…
It is proved that the family of tree languages recognized by nondeterministic tree-walking automata is not closed under complementation, solving a problem raised by Boja\'nczyk and Colcombet ("Tree-walking automata do not recognize all…
In this paper, we prove the semidecidability of the problem of saying whether or not a context-free grammar generates a regular language. We introduce the notion of context-free grammar in Marciani Normal Form. We prove that a context-free…
GF(2)-grammars are a somewhat recently introduced grammar family that have some unusual algebraic properties and are closely connected to unambiguous grammars. In "Bounded languages described by GF(2)-grammars", Makarov proved a necessary…
In this paper we prove several results on normal forms for linear displacement context-free grammars. The results themselves are rather simple and use well-known techniques, but they are extensively used in more complex constructions.…
We present a simple encoding for unlabeled noncrossing graphs and show how its latent counterpart helps us to represent several families of directed and undirected graphs used in syntactic and semantic parsing of natural language as…