Studying software evolution using artefacts' shared information content
Science of Computer Programming
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This work presents a new approximation for the Kolmogorov complexity of strings based on compression with smallest Context Free Grammars (CFG). If, for a given string, a dictionary containing its relevant patterns may be regarded as a model, a Context-Free Grammar may represent a generative model, with all of its rules (and as a consequence its own size) being meaningful. Thus, we define a new complexity approximation which takes into account the size of the string model, in a representation similar to the Minimum Description Length. These considerations result in the definition of a new compression-based similarity measure: its novelty lies in the fact that the impact of complexity overestimations, due to the limits that a real compressor has, can be accounted for and decreased.