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On a covering relation for context-free grammars

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Summary

Given a grammar for translation or compiling purposes, the structure of the grammar reflects the semantics of the language rather than good properties for parsing the language. Thus the language is often parsed with respect to another grammar which satisfies the property that the derivation trees in the original grammar can be recovered from those of the parsing grammar. ‘Undercover’ is introduced as a new concept for the formal treatment of such grammatical relations and properties of this relation are explored with an emphasis on decidability results and the relationship to existing concepts such as ‘cover’ and ‘Reynolds cover’. Some decidability questions can be related to language theoretic results on inclusion problems for simple deterministic languages.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, University of Helsinki, Tukholmankatu 2, SF-00250, Helsinki 25, Finland

    Eljas Soisalon-Soininen

  2. Department of Computer Science, University of Waterloo, N2L 3G1, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

    Derick Wood

Authors
  1. Eljas Soisalon-Soininen
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  2. Derick Wood
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Additional information

This work was carried out when the first author was visiting the Unit for Computer Science, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. The work of both authors was supported in part under a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada Grant No. A-7700

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Soisalon-Soininen, E., Wood, D. On a covering relation for context-free grammars. Acta Informatica 17, 435–449 (1982). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00264162

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00264162

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