Greibach normal form

In formal language theory, a context-free grammar is in Greibach normal form (GNF) if the right-hand sides of all production rules start with a terminal symbol, optionally followed by some variables. A non-strict form allows one exception to this format restriction for allowing the empty word (epsilon, ε) to be a member of the described language. The normal form was established by Sheila Greibach and it bears her name.

More precisely, a context-free grammar is in Greibach normal form, if all production rules are of the form:

$A\to a{A}_1{A}_2\cdots A_n$

where $A$ is a nonterminal symbol, $a$ is a terminal symbol, and $A_1{A}_2\dots A_n$ is a (possibly empty) sequence of nonterminal symbols.

Observe that the grammar does not have left recursions.

Every context-free grammar can be transformed into an equivalent grammar in Greibach normal form. Various constructions exist. Some do not permit the second form of rule and cannot transform context-free grammars that can generate the empty word. For one such construction the size of the constructed grammar is O(Template:Var⁴) in the general case and O(Template:Var³) if no derivation of the original grammar consists of a single nonterminal symbol, where Template:Var is the size of the original grammar. This conversion can be used to prove that every context-free language can be accepted by a real-time (non-deterministic) pushdown automaton, i.e., the automaton reads a letter from its input every step.

Given a grammar in GNF and a derivable string in the grammar with length Template:Var, any top-down parser will halt at depth Template:Var.

See also

• Backus–Naur form
• Chomsky normal form
• Kuroda normal form

References

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