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Journal ArticleDOI

Preservation of unambiguity and inherent ambiguity in context-free languages

TLDR
Neither unambiguity nor inherent ambiguity is preserved by any of the following language preserving operations: (a) one state complete sequential machine; (b) product by a two-element set.
Abstract
Various elementary operations are studied to find whether they preserve on ambiguity and inherent ambiguity of language (“language” means “context-free language”) The following results are established: If L is an unambiguous language and S is a generalized sequential machine, then (a) S(L) is an unambiguous language if S is one-to-one on L, and (b) S-1(L) is an unambiguous language. Inherent ambiguity is preserved by every generalized sequential machine which is one-to-one on the set of all words. The product (either left or right) of a language and a word preserves both unambiguity and inherent ambiguity. Neither unambiguity nor inherent ambiguity is preserved by any of the following language preserving operations: (a) one state complete sequential machine; (b) product by a two-element set; (c) Init(L) = [u ≠ dur in L for some v]; (d) Subw(L) = [w ≠ durr in L for some u, v].

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Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI

Conjunctive and Boolean grammars: The true general case of the context-free grammars

TL;DR: This paper surveys the results on conjunctive and Boolean Grammars obtained over the last decade, comparing them to the corresponding results for ordinary context-free grammars and their main subfamilies.
Journal ArticleDOI

A quasi-polynomial-time algorithm for sampling words from a context-free language

TL;DR: A quasi-polynomial-time algorithm for sampling almost uniformly at random from then-slice of the languageL(G) generated by an arbitrary context-free grammarG, where |G| is a natural measure of the size of grammarG.
Journal ArticleDOI

The theory of languages

TL;DR: In this article, the principal methods of describing languages and the principal results concerning each method are given.
Proceedings ArticleDOI

Computational parallels between the regular and context-free languages

TL;DR: All nontrivial predicates for certain specific classes of languages are shown to be hard, and it is shown that a dpda can always be converted in polynomial time into an equivalent d pda that always halts.
Journal ArticleDOI

Context-Limited Grammars

TL;DR: It is proved that context-limited Grammars are equivalent to context-free grammars, the equivalence including ambiguity, and a new formal model for ambiguity, based on directed plane graphs with labeled edges, is outlined and compared with other models.
References
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Book ChapterDOI

The Algebraic Theory of Context-Free Languages*

TL;DR: This chapter discusses the several classes of sentence-generating devices that are closely related, in various ways, to the grammars of both natural languages and artificial languages of various kinds.
Journal ArticleDOI

Decision problems of finite automata design and related arithmetics

TL;DR: The problems are concerned with the problems of automatically designing an automaton from a specification of a relation which is to hold between the automaton's input sequences and determined output sequences and the formalisms for expressing "design requirements" are described.
Journal ArticleDOI

Finite state languages

TL;DR: A simple structural characterization theorem for finite state languages is established, based on the cyclical structure of the grammar, which shows that the complement of any finite state language formed on a given vocabulary of symbols is also a finite statelanguage.
Journal ArticleDOI

Ambiguity in context free languages

TL;DR: It is shown that no language contained in w, each of which contains w, is inherently ambiguous, and a necessary and sufficient algebraic condition is given for a bounded language to be inherently ambiguous.
Journal ArticleDOI

Operations Which Preserve Definability in Languages

TL;DR: A large number of specific operations-many occurring in data processing--arc shown to preserve definability and, depending on the operation, sequential definability.
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