Inferring Context-Free Grammars for Domain-Specific Languages
Faizan Javed, University of Alabama at Birmingham
While grammar inference is used in areas like computational biology and pattern recognition, 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 for domain experts not well versed in programming language design and finds a second application in renovation tools for legacy systems. We use the genetic programming approach for grammatical inference. Our earlier work used grammar-specific heuristic operators in tandem with non-random construction of the initial grammar population and succeeded in inducing small grammars. We extend that work and propose the use of frequent sequences, syntax graphs and incremental construction of grammars in order to be able to infer a more comprehensive set of context-free grammars
Keywords: Context-Free Grammars, Domain-Specific Languages, Grammar Inference, Data Mining
