English

Satisfiability of Context-free String Constraints with Subword-ordering and Transducers

Formal Languages and Automata Theory 2024-01-17 v1 Logic in Computer Science

Abstract

We study the satisfiability of string constraints where context-free membership constraints may be imposed on variables. Additionally a variable may be constrained to be a subword of a word obtained by shuffling variables and their transductions. The satisfiability problem is known to be undecidable even without rational transductions. It is known to be NExptime-complete without transductions, if the subword relations between variables do not have a cyclic dependency between them. We show that the satisfiability problem stays decidable in this fragment even when rational transductions are added. It is 2NExptime-complete with context-free membership, and NExptime-complete with only regular membership. For the lower bound we prove a technical lemma that is of independent interest: The length of the shortest word in the intersection of a pushdown automaton (of size O(n)O(n)) and nn finite-state automata (each of size O(n)O(n)) can be double exponential in nn.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2401.07996,
  title  = {Satisfiability of Context-free String Constraints with Subword-ordering and Transducers},
  author = {C Aiswarya and Soumodev Mal and Prakash Saivasan},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2401.07996},
  year   = {2024}
}