Papers for

parser developers

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Testing correctness of structured parentheses requires many queries

Query Complexity of Testing Structured Parenthesis Languages

Abstract: We study the query complexity of testing membership in structured string languages, focusing on Dyck languages and natural generalizations. A tester receives query access to a word and must distinguish valid inputs from words that are far in Hamming distance, while inspecting only a sublinear number of positions. Our results sharpen the boundary between constant-query testability and polynomial query complexity. First, we prove an $Ω(n^{2/5})$ lower bound for testing Dyck languages $D_m$ with any fixed number $m\ge2$ of parenthesis types, improving the previous $Ω(n^{1/5})$ lower bound of Fischer, Magniez, and Starikovskaya (SODA `18) and nearly matching their upper bound of $O(n^{2/5+o(1)})$. Furthermore, we show that all nonadaptive algorithms for these problems require $Ω(n^{1/2})$ queries. Our lower bounds use a Pólya-urn process to construct the hard distribution; Second, we identify a broad class of weighted-parenthesis languages, which we call {\em excursion languages,} that remain constant-query testable. These languages encode bounded-step walks that stay nonnegative and return to zero. For every fixed excursion language, we give a nonadaptive tester with query complexity $O(1/\varepsilon^2)$, and we prove this dependence on $\varepsilon$ is optimal, even for adaptive algorithms. As a special case, we obtain the tight $Θ(1/\varepsilon^2)$ query complexity of testing $D_1$, improving the previous $O(\log(1/\varepsilon)/\varepsilon^2)$ upper bound and giving the first matching two-sided-error lower bound. Third, we construct a simple hard language, Hidden String, that is generated by a deterministic linear grammar but nevertheless requires $Ω(n^{2/5})$ adaptive queries and $Ω(n^{1/2})$ nonadaptive queries to test. This shows that polynomial query complexity appears even for highly restricted string languages.

Tue 29 SeptData Structures and AlgorithmsComputational Complexity
The gist
This paper studies how hard it is to check if a string of parentheses is correctly matched by inspecting only parts of it. The authors find that for complex cases with multiple types of parentheses, any test must look at a substantial portion of the string to be reliable, but for simpler, well-structured cases, quick tests are possible. They improve previous understanding of which structured languages need many checks and which don't. They also identify a special kind of language that, despite being simple, still resists fast testing.
Open → 2609.37431v1