EDBT 2026 Demo / reviewers in the wild / expert
Brink van der Merwe
dblp:59/6051 · also A. B. van der Merwe
· DBLP profile ↗
27ranked-venue papers
5as first author
10since 2021 · last 2026
0000-0001-5010-9934ORCID · verified
Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several
Theory of computation · 25 · 5 first-author · 9 since 2021Security and privacy · 1 · 1 since 2021Software engineering, systems software and programming languages · 1
| Year | Publication | Venue | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | Minimal Deterministic Finite Automata from Alternating and Boolean Automata
Hellis Tamm, Brink van der Merwe |
CIAA | 2 |
| 2026 | Constructing a BPE tokenization DFAabstractMany natural language processing systems operate over tokenizations of text to address the open-vocabulary problem. In this paper, we give and analyze an algorithm for the efficient construction of deterministic finite automata (DFA) designed to operate directly on tokenizations produced by the popular byte pair encoding (BPE) technique. This makes it possible to apply many existing techniques and algorithms to the tokenized case, such as pattern matching, equivalence checking of tokenization dictionaries, and composing tokenized languages in various ways. The construction preserves some key properties of the automaton, and we use this to establish asymptotic bounds on the state complexity of the automata that result. Finally, we demonstrate how to construct an input-deterministic (subsequential) string-to-string transducer which precisely describes the relationship between strings and their correct tokenizations. Martin Berglund, Willeke Martens, Brink van der Merwe |
Theor. Comput. Sci. | 3 |
| 2025 | Constructing Compact BPE Token DFAs
Martin Berglund, Willeke Martens, Brink van der Merwe |
CIAA | 4 |
| 2024 | Constructing a BPE Tokenization DFA
Martin Berglund, Willeke Martens, Brink van der Merwe |
CIAA | 3 |
| 2024 | Benchmarking Regular Expression Matching
Alexander Roodt, Brendan Keith Mark Watling, Willem Bester, Brink van der Merwe, Sicheol Sung, Yo-Sub Han |
CIAA | 4 |
| 2023 | Learning Type Inference for Enhanced Dataflow Analysis
Lukas Seidel, Sedick Baker Effendi, Xavier Pinho, Konrad Rieck, Brink van der Merwe, Fabian Yamaguchi |
ESORICS (4) | 5 |
| 2023 | Re-examining regular expressions with backreferences
Martin Berglund, Brink van der Merwe |
Theor. Comput. Sci. | 2 |
| 2022 | Ordered Context-Free Grammars
Brink van der Merwe, Martin Berglund |
CIAA | 1 |
| 2021 | Memoized Regular Expressions
Brink van der Merwe, Jacobie Mouton, Steyn van Litsenborgh, Martin Berglund |
CIAA | 1 |
| 2021 | Formalising and implementing Boost POSIX regular expression matching
Martin Berglund, Willem Bester, Brink van der Merwe |
Theor. Comput. Sci. | 3 |
| 2018 | Formalising Boost POSIX Regular Expression Matching
Martin Berglund, Willem Bester, Brink van der Merwe |
ICTAC | 3 |
| 2017 | Lower Bound Methods for the Size of Nondeterministic Finite Automata Revisited
Hellis Tamm, Brink van der Merwe |
LATA | 2 |
| 2017 | Addressing challenges in obtaining high coverage when model checking Android applicationsabstractCurrent dynamic analysis tools for Android applications do not get good code coverage since they can only explore a subset of the behaviors of the applications and do not have full control over the environment in which they execute. In this work we use model checking to systematically explore application paths while reducing the analysis size using state matching and backtracking. In particular, we extend the Java PathFinder (JPF) model checking environment for Android. We describe the difficulties one needs to overcome to make this a reality as well as our current approaches to handling these issues. We obtain significantly higher coverage using shorter event sequences on a representative sample of Android apps, when compared to Dynodroid and Sapienz, the current state-of-the-art dynamic analysis tools for Android applications. Heila Botha, Oksana Tkachuk, Brink van der Merwe, Willem Visser |
SPIN | 3 |
| 2017 | On the Semantics of Atomic Subgroups in Practical Regular Expressions
Martin Berglund, Brink van der Merwe, Bruce W. Watson, Nicolaas Weideman |
CIAA | 2 |
| 2017 | Tight Bounds for Cut-Operations on Deterministic Finite AutomataabstractWe investigate the state complexity of the cut and iterated cut operation for deterministic finite automata (DFAs), answering an open question stated in [M. BERGLUND, et al.: Cuts in regular expressions. In Proc. DLT, LNCS 7907, 2011]. These operations can be seen as an alternative to ordinary conc atenation and Kleene star modelling leftmost maximal string matching. We show that the cut operation has a matching upper and lower bound of n states, if m = 1, and (n–1)·m+n states, otherwise, on DFAs accepting the cut of two individual languages that are accepted by n- and m-state DFAs, respectively. In the unary case we obtain max(2n–1,m+n–2) states as a tight bound—notice that for m ≤ n the bound for unary DFAs only depends on the former automaton and not on the latter. For accepting the iterated cut of a language accepted by an n-state DFA we find a matching bound of 1+(n+1) · F(1,n+2,–n+2;n+1 | –1) states on DFAs, if n ≥ 4 and where F refers to the generalized hypergeometric function. This bound is in the order of magnitude Θ((n – 1)!). Finally, the bound drops to 2n – 1 for unary DFAs accepting the iterated cut of an n-state DFA, if n ≥ 3, and thus is similar to the bound for the cut operation on unary DFAs. Frank Drewes, Markus Holzer 0001, Sebastian Jakobi, Brink van der Merwe |
Fundam. Informaticae | 4 |
| 2017 | On the semantics of regular expression parsing in the wild
Martin Berglund, Brink van der Merwe |
Theor. Comput. Sci. | 2 |
| 2016 | Analyzing Matching Time Behavior of Backtracking Regular Expression Matchers by Using Ambiguity of NFA
Nicolaas Weideman, Brink van der Merwe, Martin Berglund, Bruce W. Watson |
CIAA | 2 |
| 2015 | Tight Bounds for Cut-Operations on Deterministic Finite Automata
Frank Drewes, Markus Holzer 0001, Sebastian Jakobi, Brink van der Merwe |
MCU | 4 |
| 2015 | On the Semantics of Regular Expression Parsing in the Wild
Martin Berglund, Brink van der Merwe |
CIAA | 2 |
| 2014 | Graph transformation for incremental natural language analysis
Suna Bensch, Frank Drewes, Helmut Jürgensen, Brink van der Merwe |
Theor. Comput. Sci. | 4 |
| 2014 | Ambiguity and structural ambiguity of symmetric difference NFAs
Brink van der Merwe, Lynette van Zijl, Jaco Geldenhuys |
Theor. Comput. Sci. | 1 |
| 2013 | Cuts in Regular Expressions
Martin Berglund, Henrik Björklund, Frank Drewes, Brink van der Merwe, Bruce W. Watson |
Developments in Language Theory | 4 |
| 2013 | Counting Minimal Symmetric Difference NFAs
Brink van der Merwe, Mark Farag, Jaco Geldenhuys |
LATA | 1 |
| 2011 | Ambiguity of Unary Symmetric Difference NFAs
Brink van der Merwe, Lynette van Zijl, Jaco Geldenhuys |
ICTAC | 1 |
| 2008 | Path Languages of Random Permitting Context Tree Grammars are Regular
Frank Drewes, Brink van der Merwe |
Fundam. Informaticae | 2 |
| 2008 | Bag Context Tree Grammars
Frank Drewes, Christine du Toit, Sigrid Ewert, Brink van der Merwe, Andries P. J. van der Walt |
Fundam. Informaticae | 4 |
| 2006 | Bag Context Tree Grammars
Frank Drewes, Christine du Toit, Sigrid Ewert, Brink van der Merwe, Andries P. J. van der Walt |
Developments in Language Theory | 4 |