A4 Refereed article in a conference publication
Linear grammars with one-sided contexts and their automaton representation
Authors: Alexander Okhotin, Mikhail Barash
Conference name: International symposium on latin american theoretical informatics
Publication year: 2014
Journal: Lecture Notes in Computer Science
Series title: LNCS
Number in series: 8392
Volume: 8392
First page : 190
Last page: 201
Number of pages: 12
ISSN: 0302-9743
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-54423-1_17
The paper considers a family of formal grammars that extends linear context-free grammars with an operator for referring to the left context of a substring being defined, as well as with a conjunction operation (as in linear conjunctive grammars). These grammars are proved to be computationally equivalent to an extension of one-way real-time cellular automata with an extra data channel. The main result is the undecidability of the emptiness problem for grammars restricted to a one-symbol alphabet, which is proved by simulating a Turing machine by a cellular automaton with feedback. The same construction proves the $\Sigma^0_2$-completeness of the finiteness problem for these grammars and automata.