Automatic evaluation of context-free grammars (system description)

Abstract

We implement an online judge for context-free grammars. Our system contains a list of problems describing formal languages, and asking for grammars generating them. A submitted proposal grammar receives a verdict of acceptance or rejection depending on whether the judge determines that it is equivalent to the reference solution grammar provided by the problem setter. Since equivalence of context-free grammars is an undecidable problem, we consider a maximum length ℓ and only test equivalence of the generated languages up to words of length ℓ. This length restriction is very often sufficient for the well-meant submissions. Since this restricted problem is still NP-complete, we design and implement methods based on hashing, SAT, and automata that perform well in practice. © 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland.