On the Intersection of Context-Free and Regular Languages

TL;DR

This paper extends the classic Bar-Hillel construction to handle finite-state automata with epsilon-arcs, enabling intersection with context-free languages while preserving automaton size.

Contribution

It introduces a generalized construction that manages epsilon-arcs in automata, maintaining the size and structure of the original intersection method.

Findings

Generalized construction handles epsilon-arcs in automata.

The new grammar encodes automaton and grammar structure.

Asymptotic size of the original construction is retained.

Abstract

The Bar-Hillel construction is a classic result in formal language theory. It shows, by a simple construction, that the intersection of a context-free language and a regular language is itself context-free. In the construction, the regular language is specified by a finite-state automaton. However, neither the original construction (Bar-Hillel et al., 1961) nor its weighted extension (Nederhof and Satta, 2003) can handle finite-state automata with $\varepsilon$-arcs. While it is possible to remove $\varepsilon$-arcs from a finite-state automaton efficiently without modifying the language, such an operation modifies the automaton's set of paths. We give a construction that generalizes the Bar-Hillel in the case where the desired automaton has $\varepsilon$-arcs, and further prove that our generalized construction leads to a grammar that encodes the structure of both the input automaton and grammar while retaining the asymptotic size of the original construction.