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Context-Free Grammars for Deterministic Regular Expressions with Interleaving

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Theoretical Aspects of Computing – ICTAC 2019 (ICTAC 2019)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 11884))

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Abstract

In this paper, we study deterministic regular expressions with interleaving (IDREs). Regular expressions extended with interleaving are good at describing sequential and parallel data patterns. The interleaving makes these expressions exponentially more succinct than standard regular expressions. And when they obey the determinism constraint, they are more efficient for matching and parsing processes than general ones. However, the interleaving also makes the structure of expressions more complex, and the semantic definition of determinism is hard to follow, which prevent users from writing and developing IDREs. We address this problem by proposing a determinism checking method and a syntactic description for IDREs. Our checking method can locate the source of nondeterminism more efficiently and accurately than the existing method when the nondeterminism is caused by unary operators. We prove that the grammars of IDREs are context-free and suggest effective optimization rules to simplify the grammars.

Work supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant Nos. 61872339 and 61472405.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Computer Science, Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

    Xiaoying Mou, Haiming Chen & Yeting Li

  2. University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

    Xiaoying Mou & Yeting Li

Authors
  1. Xiaoying Mou
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  2. Haiming Chen
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  3. Yeting Li
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Haiming Chen .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK

    Robert Mark Hierons

  2. University of Bordeaux, Talence, France

    Mohamed Mosbah

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Mou, X., Chen, H., Li, Y. (2019). Context-Free Grammars for Deterministic Regular Expressions with Interleaving. In: Hierons, R., Mosbah, M. (eds) Theoretical Aspects of Computing – ICTAC 2019. ICTAC 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11884. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32505-3_14

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32505-3_14

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-32504-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-32505-3

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