!-Graphs with Trivial Overlap are Context-Free

Aleks Kissinger
(University of Oxford)
Vladimir Zamdzhiev
(University of Oxford)

String diagrams are a powerful tool for reasoning about composite structures in symmetric monoidal categories. By representing string diagrams as graphs, equational reasoning can be done automatically by double-pushout rewriting. !-graphs give us the means of expressing and proving properties about whole families of these graphs simultaneously. While !-graphs provide elegant proofs of surprisingly powerful theorems, little is known about the formal properties of the graph languages they define. This paper takes the first step in characterising these languages by showing that an important subclass of !-graphs—those whose repeated structures only overlap trivially—can be encoded using a (context-free) vertex replacement grammar.

In Arend Rensink and Eduardo Zambon: Proceedings Graphs as Models (GaM 2015), London, UK, 11-12 April 2015, Electronic Proceedings in Theoretical Computer Science 181, pp. 16–31.
Published: 10th April 2015.

ArXived at: https://dx.doi.org/10.4204/EPTCS.181.2 bibtex PDF
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