In formal language theory, a context-free language (CFL), also called a Chomsky type-2 language, is a language generated by a context-free grammar (CFG).
Context-free languages have many applications in programming languages, in particular, most arithmetic expressions are generated by context-free grammars.
Different context-free grammars can generate the same context-free language. Intrinsic properties of the language can be distinguished from extrinsic properties of a particular grammar by comparing multiple grammars that describe the language.
The set of all context-free languages is identical to the set of languages accepted by pushdown automata, which makes these languages amenable to parsing. Further, for a given CFG, there is a direct way to produce a pushdown automaton for the grammar (and thereby the corresponding language), though going the other way (producing a grammar given an automaton) is not as direct.
An example context-free language is , the language of all non-empty even-length strings, the entire first halves of which are 's, and the entire second halves of which are 's. is generated by the grammar . This language is not regular. It is accepted by the pushdown automaton where is defined as follows:
Unambiguous CFLs are a proper subset of all CFLs: there are inherently ambiguous CFLs. An example of an inherently ambiguous CFL is the union of with . This set is context-free, since the union of two context-free languages is always context-free. But there is no way to unambiguously parse strings in the (non-context-free) subset which is the intersection of these two languages.
The language of all properly matched parentheses is generated by the grammar .
The context-free nature of the language makes it simple to parse with a pushdown automaton.
Determining an instance of the membership problem; i.e. given a string , determine whether where is the language generated by a given grammar ; is also known as recognition. Context-free recognition for Chomsky normal form grammars was shown by Leslie G. Valiant to be reducible to Boolean matrix multiplication, thus inheriting its complexity upper bound of O(n<sup>2.3728596</sup>). Conversely, Lillian Lee has shown O(n<sup>3âÂÂõ</sup>) Boolean matrix multiplication to be reducible to O(n<sup>3âÂÂ3õ</sup>) CFG parsing, thus establishing some kind of lower bound for the latter.
Practical uses of context-free languages require also to produce a derivation tree that exhibits the structure that the grammar associates with the given string. The process of producing this tree is called parsing. Known parsers have a time complexity that is cubic in the size of the string that is parsed.
Formally, the set of all context-free languages is identical to the set of languages accepted by pushdown automata (PDA). Parser algorithms for context-free languages include the CYK algorithm and Earley's Algorithm.
A special subclass of context-free languages are the deterministic context-free languages which are defined as the set of languages accepted by a deterministic pushdown automaton and can be parsed by a LR(k) parser.
See also parsing expression grammar as an alternative approach to grammar and parser.
The class of context-free languages is closed under the following operations. That is, if L and P are context-free languages, the following languages are context-free as well:
The context-free languages are not closed under intersection. This can be seen by taking the languages and , which are both context-free. Their intersection is , which can be shown to be non-context-free by the pumping lemma for context-free languages. As a consequence, context-free languages cannot be closed under complementation, as for any languages A and B, their intersection can be expressed by union and complement: . In particular, context-free language cannot be closed under difference, since complement can be expressed by difference: .
However, if L is a context-free language and D is a regular language then both their intersection and their difference are context-free languages.
In formal language theory, questions about regular languages are usually decidable, but ones about context-free languages are often not. It is decidable whether such a language is finite, but not whether it contains every possible string, is regular, is unambiguous, or is equivalent to a language with a different grammar.
The following problems are undecidable for arbitrarily given context-free grammars A and B:
The following problems are decidable for arbitrary context-free languages:
According to Hopcroft, Motwani, Ullman (2006), many of the fundamental closure and (un)decidability properties of context-free languages were shown in the 1961 paper of Bar-Hillel, Perles, and Shamir.
The set is a context-sensitive language, but there does not exist a context-free grammar generating this language. So there exist context-sensitive languages which are not context-free. To prove that a given language is not context-free, one may employ the pumping lemma for context-free languages or a number of other methods, such as Ogden's lemma or Parikh's theorem.