English

!-Graphs with Trivial Overlap are Context-Free

Logic in Computer Science 2016-02-22 v3 Formal Languages and Automata Theory Category Theory

Abstract

String diagrams are a powerful tool for reasoning about composite structures in symmetric monoidal categories. By representing string diagrams as graphs, equational reasoning can be done automatically by double-pushout rewriting. !-graphs give us the means of expressing and proving properties about whole families of these graphs simultaneously. While !-graphs provide elegant proofs of surprisingly powerful theorems, little is known about the formal properties of the graph languages they define. This paper takes the first step in characterising these languages by showing that an important subclass of !-graphs--those whose repeated structures only overlap trivially--can be encoded using a (context-free) vertex replacement grammar.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1501.06059,
  title  = {!-Graphs with Trivial Overlap are Context-Free},
  author = {Aleks Kissinger and Vladimir Zamdzhiev},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1501.06059},
  year   = {2016}
}

Comments

In Proceedings GaM 2015, arXiv:1504.02448

R2 v1 2026-06-22T08:12:05.682Z