Home
 

A quasi-polynomial-time algorithm for sampling words from a context-free language

Vivek Gore and Mark Jerrum

Abstract: A quasi-polynomial-time algorithm is presented for sampling almost uniformly at random from the n-slice of the language L(G) generated by an arbitrary context-free grammar G. (The n-slice of a language L over an alphabet alph is the subset of L of words of length exactly n.) The time complexity of the algorithm is epsilon-2(n |G|)O(log n), where the parameter epsilon bounds the variation of the output distribution from uniform, and |G| is a natural measure of the size of grammar G. The algorithm applies to a class of language sampling problems that includes slices of context-free languages as a proper subclass.

LFCS report ECS-LFCS-95-326, July 1995.

Previous | Index | Next