Grammars Based on a Logic of Hypergraph Languages

Abstract: The hyperedge replacement grammar (HRG) formalism is a natural and well-known generalization of context-free grammars. HRGs inherit a number of properties of context-free grammars, e.g. the pumping lemma. This lemma turns out to be a strong restriction in the hypergraph case: it implies that languages of unbounded connectivity cannot be generated by HRGs. We introduce a formalism that turns out to be more powerful than HRGs while having the same algorithmic complexity (NP-complete). Namely, we introduce hypergraph Lambek grammars; they are based on the hypergraph Lambek calculus, which may be considered as a logic of hypergraph languages. We explain the underlying principles of hypergraph Lambek grammars, establish their basic properties, and show some languages of unbounded connectivity that can be generated by them (e.g. the language of all graphs, the language of all bipartite graphs, the language of all regular graphs).