Formal Languages and Automata Theory
Predictive shift-reduce (PSR) parsing for hyperedge replacement (HR) grammars is very efficient, but restricted to a subclass of unambiguous HR grammars. To overcome this restriction, we have recently extended PSR parsing to generalized PSR…
Context-dependent fusion grammars were recently introduced as devices for the generation of hypergraph languages. In this paper, we show that this new type of hypergraph grammars, where the application of fusion rules is restricted by…
We introduce the class CXRPQ of conjunctive xregex path queries, which are obtained from conjunctive regular path queries (CRPQs) by adding string variables (also called backreferences) as found in practical implementations of regular…
We compute the exact maximum state complexity for the language consisting of $m$ words of length $N$, and characterize languages achieving the maximum. We also consider a special case, namely languages $C(w)$ consisting of the conjugates of…
We present Prema, a tool for Precise Requirement Editing, Modeling and Analysis. It can be used in various fields for describing precise requirements using formal notations and performing rigorous analysis. By parsing the requirements…
A tower is a sequence of words alternating between two languages in such a way that every word is a subsequence of the following word. The height of the tower is the number of words in the sequence. If there is no infinite tower (a tower of…
The concept of "lost positions" is a recently introduced tool for counting the number of runs in words. We investigate the frequency of lost positions in prefixes of words. This leads to an algorithm that allows to show, using an extensive…
We investigate the behavior of the periods and border lengths of random words over a fixed alphabet. We show that the asymptotic probability that a random word has a given maximal border length $k$ is a constant, depending only on $k$ and…
We characterize binary words that have exactly two unbordered conjugates and show that they can be expressed as a product of two palindromes.
Recently, a short and elegant proof was presented showing that a binary word of length $n$ contains at most $n-3$ runs. Here we show, using the same technique and a computer search, that the number of runs in a binary word of length $n$ is…
We will prove that the word $a^ib^ja^k$ is periodicity forcing if $j \geq 3$ and $i+k \geq 3$, where $i$ and $k$ are positive integers. Also we will give examples showing that both bounds are optimal.
The question about maximal size of independent system of word equations is one of the most striking problems in combinatorics on words. Recently, Aleksi Saarela has introduced a new approach to the problem that is based on linear-algebraic…
If an infinite non-periodic word is uniformly recurrent or is of bounded repetition, then the limit of its periodicity complexity is infinity. Moreover, there are uniformly recurrent words with the periodicity complexity arbitrarily high at…
Opacity is an information flow property characterizing whether a system reveals its secret to an intruder. Verification of opacity for discrete-event systems modeled by automata is in general a hard problem. We discuss the question whether…
Compositions of tree-walking tree transducers form a hierarchy with respect to the number of transducers in the composition. As main technical result it is proved that any such composition can be realized as a linear bounded composition,…
In 2005, Rampersad and the second author proved a number of theorems about infinite words x with the property that if w is any sufficiently long finite factor of x, then its reversal w^R is not a factor of x. In this note we revisit these…
Given a partially-ordered finite alphabet $\Sigma$ and a language $L\subseteq \Sigma^*$, how large can an antichain in $L$ be (where $L$ is given the lexicographic ordering)? More precisely, since $L$ will in general be infinite, we should…
Given, a sequence $\mathcal{X}$ of $n$ variables, a time-series constraint ctr using the Sum aggregator, and a sliding time-series constraint enforcing the constraint ctr on each sliding window of $\mathcal{X}$ of $m$ consecutive variables,…
In this paper we introduce and study fuzzy deterministic top-down (DT) tree automata over a lattice L. The L-fuzzy tree languages recognized by these automata are said to be DT-recognizable, and they form a proper subfamily $DRec_L$ of the…
A Petri net is choice-free if any place has at most one transition in its postset (consuming its tokens) and it is (extended) free-choice (EFC) if the postsets of any two places are either equal or disjoint. Asymmetric choice (AC) extends…