Inferring context-free grammars for domain-specific languages

Grammatical inference (or grammar inference) has been applied to various problems in areas such as computational biology, and speech and pattern recognition but its application to the programming language problem domain has been limited. We propose a new application area for grammar inference which intends to make domain-specific language development easier and finds a second application in renovation tools for legacy software systems. We discuss the improvements made to our core incremental approach to inferring context-free grammars. The approach affords a number of advancements over our previous geneticprogramming based inference system. We discuss the beam search heuristic for improved searching in the solution space of all grammars, the Minimum Description Length heuristic to direct the search towards simpler grammars, and the right-hand-side subset constructor operator.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: OOPSLA
• Authors: Faizan Javed
• Keywords: Geneticprogramming Based Inference, Grammar Inference, Grammatical Inference, OOPSLA 2005