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Modeling grammatical evolution by automaton

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Abstract

Twelve years have passed since the advent of grammatical evolution (GE) in 1998, but such issues as vast search space, genotypic readability, and the inherent relationship among grammatical concepts, production rules and derivations have remained untouched in almost all existing GE researches. Model-based approach is an attractive method to achieve different objectives of software engineering. In this paper, we make the first attempt to model syntactically usable information of GE using an automaton, coming up with a novel solution called model-based grammatical evolution (MGE) to these problems. In MGE, the search space is reduced dramatically through the use of concepts from building blocks, but the functionality and expressiveness are still the same as that of classical GE. Besides, complex evolutionary process can visually be analyzed in the context of transition diagrams.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Software Engineering, Wuhan University, Wuhan, 430072, China

    Pei He

  2. School of Computing, University of Kent, Canterbury, CT2 7NF, England

    Colin G. Johnson

  3. School of Computer and Communication Engineering, Changsha University of Science and Technology, Changsha, 410114, China

    Pei He

  4. Institute of Computational Linguistics, Peking University, Beijing, 100080, China

    HouFeng Wang

Authors
  1. Pei He
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  2. Colin G. Johnson
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  3. HouFeng Wang
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Correspondence to Pei He.

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He, P., Johnson, C.G. & Wang, H. Modeling grammatical evolution by automaton. Sci. China Inf. Sci. 54, 2544–2553 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11432-011-4411-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11432-011-4411-8

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