In formal language theory, the ChomskySchützenberger representation theorem is a theorem derived by Noam Chomsky and Marcel-Paul Schützenberger about representing a given context-free language in terms of two simpler languages. These two simpler languages, namely a regular language and a Dyck language, are combined by means of an intersection and a homomorphism.

A few notions from formal language theory are in order. A context-free language is regular, if it can be described by a regular expression, or, equivalently, if it is accepted by a finite automaton. A homomorphism is based on a function which maps symbols from an alphabet to words over another alphabet ; If the domain of this function is extended to words over in the natural way, by letting for all words and , this yields a homomorphism . A matched alphabet is an alphabet with two equal-sized sets; it is convenient to think of it as a set of parentheses types, where contains the opening parenthesis symbols, whereas the symbols in contains the closing parenthesis symbols. For a matched alphabet , the Dyck language is given by

ChomskySchützenberger theorem. A language L over the alphabet is context-free if and only if there exists

  • a matched alphabet
  • a regular language over ,
  • and a homomorphism
such that .

Proofs of this theorem are found in several textbooks, e.g. Autebert, Berstel & Boasson (1997) or Davis, Sigal & Weyuker (1994).

References

  • Autebert, Jean-Michel; Berstel, Jean; Boasson, Luc (1997). "Context-Free Languages and Push-Down Automata" (PDF). In G. Rozenberg and A. Salomaa, eds., Handbook of Formal Languages, Vol. 1: Word, Language, Grammar (pp. 111174). Berlin: Springer-Verlag. ISBN 3-540-60420-0.
  • Davis, Martin D.; Sigal, Ron; Weyuker, Elaine J. (1994). Computability, Complexity, and Languages: Fundamentals of Theoretical Computer Science (2nd ed.). Elsevier Science. p. 306. ISBN 0-12-206382-1.
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