Research Group on Natural Computing

Insertion-deletion operations are much investigated in linguistics and in DNA computing and several characterizations of Turing computability and characterizations or representations of languages in Chomsky hierarchy were obtained in this framework.

In this note we contribute to this research direction with a new characterization of this type, as well as with representations of regular and context-free languages, mainly starting from context-free insertion systems of as small as possible complexity. For instance, each recursively enumerable language L can be represented in a way similar to the celebrated Chomsky-Schützenberger representation of context-free languages, i.e., in the form L = h(L(γ) ∩ D), where γ is an insertion system of weight (3, 0) (at most three symbols are inserted in a context of length zero), h is a projection, and D is a Dyck language. A similar representation can be obtained for regular languages, involving insertion systemsof weight (2,0) and star languages, as well as for context-free languages – this time using insertion systems of weight (3, 0) and star languages.