Tree-adjunct grammatical evolution

In this paper we investigate the application of Tree-Adjunct Grammars to Grammatical Evolution. The standard type of grammar used by grammatical evolution, context-free grammars, produce a subset of the languages that tree-adjunct grammars can produce, making tree-adjunct grammars, expressively, more powerful. In this study we shed some light on the effects of tree-adjunct grammars in grammatical evolution, or Tree-Adjunct Grammatical Evolution. We perform an analytic comparison of the performance of both setups, i.e., grammatical evolution and tree-adjunct grammatical evolution, across a number of classic genetic programming benchmarking problems. The results firmly indicate that tree-adjunct grammatical evolution has a better overall performance (measured in terms of finding the global optima).