On the Membership Problem of Permutation Grammars — A Direct Proof of NP-Completeness

Abstract

One of the most essential classes of problems related to formal languages is the membership problem (also called word problem), i.e., to decide whether a given input word belongs to the language specified, e.g., by a generative grammar. For context-free languages the problem is solved efficiently by various well-known parsing algorithms. However, there are several important languages that are not context-free. The membership problem of the context-sensitive language class is PSPACE-complete, thus, it is believed that it is generally not solvable in an efficient way. There are various language classes between the above mentioned two classes having membership problems with various complexity. One of these classes, the class of permutation languages, is generated by permutation grammars, i.e., context-free grammars extended with permutation rules, where a permutation rule allows to interchange the position of two consecutive nonterminals in the sentential form. In this paper, the membership problem for permutation languages is studied. A proof is presented to show that this problem is NP-complete.