Edit distance for pushdown automata

Abstract

The edit distance between two words w1, w2 is the minimal number of word operations (letter insertions, deletions, and substitutions) necessary to transform w1 to w2. The edit distance generalizes to languages L1,L2, where the edit distance is the minimal number k such that for every word from L1 there exists a word in L2 with edit distance at most k. We study the edit distance computation problem between pushdown automata and their subclasses. The problem of computing edit distance to pushdown automata is undecidable, and in practice, the interesting question is to compute the edit distance from a pushdown automaton (the implementation, a standard model for programs with recursion) to a regular language (the specification). In this work, we present a complete picture of decidability and complexity for deciding whether, for a given threshold k, the edit distance from a pushdown automaton to a finite automaton is at most k.