Contextual Hyperedge Replacement Grammars: Languages – Parsing – Grappa

Abstract

Graph transformation allows to extend formal language theory to the generation of graph languages. This has applications in areas such as model-driven software engineering, natural language processing, and shape analysis of programs.

We start from the well-established theory of context-free grammars based on hyperedge replacement (HR) and introduces a modest extension, contextual hyperedge replacement (CHR), in order to extend their generative power. We discuss the generative power and other properties of CHR, and relate them to HR.

Then we consider parsing for CHR grammars. As for HR, parsing is NP-complete in general, so that efficient parsing algorithms can only be achieved for subclasses. We have devised two algorithms, called predictive top-down (PTD) and predictive shift-reduce (PSR), which are inspired by the well-known LL(k) and LR(k) parsing for strings, and are usually linear, at most quadratic. We illustrate the ideas of these algorithms by graph transformation rules.

Finally we demonstrate Mark Minas' graph parser generator Grappa, which implements not only PTD and PSR parsing, including the needed analysis tools, but also generalized PSR, where parallel parsing allows to cope with ambiguous grammars. Measurements of generated parsers validate our theoretical findings regarding complexity.