Regular algebra applied to language problems

Many functions on context-free languages can be expressed in the form of the least fixed point of a function whose definition mimics the grammar of the given language. Examples include the function returning the length of the shortest word in a language, and the function returning the smallest number of edit operations required to transform a given word into a word in a language. This paper presents the basic theory that explains when a function on a context-free language can be defined in this way. It is shown how the theory can be applied in a methodology for programming the evaluation of such functions. Specific results include a novel definition of a regular algebra focusing on the existence of so-called “factors”, and several constructions of non-trivial regular algebras. Several challenging problems are given as examples, some of which are old and some of which are new. © 2005 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.