Related papers: Decision Problems For Convex Languages
We consider a general class of decision problems concerning formal languages, called ``(one-dimensional) unboundedness predicates'', for automata that feature reversal-bounded counters (RBCA). We show that each problem in this class reduces…
In this paper we explore a new hierarchy of classes of languages and infinite words and its connection with complexity classes. Namely, we say that a language belongs to the class $L_k$ if it is a subset of the catenation of $k$ languages…
Indexing strings via prefix (or suffix) sorting is, arguably, one of the most successful algorithmic techniques developed in the last decades. Can indexing be extended to languages? The main contribution of this paper is to initiate the…
A deterministic finite automaton (DFA) is composite if its language can be decomposed into an intersection of languages of smaller DFAs. Otherwise, A is prime. This notion of primality was introduced by Kupferman and Mosheiff in 2013, and…
We study regular expressions that use variables, or parameters, which are interpreted as alphabet letters. We consider two classes of languages denoted by such expressions: under the possibility semantics, a word belongs to the language if…
The relationship between the length of a word and the maximum length of its unbordered factors is investigated in this paper. Consider a finite word w of length n. We call a word bordered, if it has a proper prefix which is also a suffix of…
A regular language is $k$-piecewise testable if it is a finite boolean combination of languages of the form $\Sigma^* a_1 \Sigma^* \cdots \Sigma^* a_n \Sigma^*$, where $a_i\in\Sigma$ and $0\le n \le k$. Given a DFA $A$ and $k\ge 0$, it is…
The downward closure of a language is the set of all (not necessarily contiguous) subwords of its members. It is well-known that the downward closure of every language is regular. Moreover, recent results show that downward closures are…
The class of local languages is a well-known subclass of the regular languages that admits many equivalent characterizations. In this short note we establish the PSPACE-completeness of the problem of determining, given as input a…
Given a regular language L over an ordered alphabet $\Sigma$, the set of lexicographically smallest (resp., largest) words of each length is itself regular. Moreover, there exists an unambiguous finite-state transducer that, on a given word…
Given a language L and a nondeterministic finite automaton M, we consider whether we can determine efficiently (in the size of M) if M accepts at least one word in L, or infinitely many words. Given that M accepts at least one word in L, we…
We continue our study of open and closed languages. We investigate how the properties of being open and closed are preserved under concatenation. We investigate analogues, in formal languages, of the separation axioms in topological spaces;…
We consider a language together with the subword relation, the cover relation, and regular predicates. For such structures, we consider the extension of first-order logic by threshold- and modulo-counting quantifiers. Depending on the…
In this paper, we study arbitrary regular factorial languages over a finite alphabet $\Sigma$. For the set of words $L(n)$ of the length $n$ belonging to a regular factorial language $L$, we investigate the depth of decision trees solving…
Co-lex partial orders were recently introduced in (Cotumaccio et al., SODA 2021 and JACM 2023) as a powerful tool to index finite state automata, with applications to regular expression matching. They generalize Wheeler orders (Gagie et…
It is well known that computing a minimum DFA consistent with a given set of positive and negative examples is NP-hard. Previous work has identified conditions on the input sample under which the problem becomes tractable or remains hard.…
Patterns are words with terminals and variables. The language of a pattern is the set of words obtained by uniformly substituting all variables with words that contain only terminals. In their original definition, patterns only allow for…
The computational complexity of the isomorphism problem for regular trees, regular linear orders, and regular words is analyzed. A tree is regular if it is isomorphic to the prefix order on a regular language. In case regular languages are…
A vector addition system (VAS) with an initial and a final marking and transition labels induces a language. In part because the reachability problem in VAS remains far from being well-understood, it is difficult to devise decision…
We consider several novel aspects of unique factorization in formal languages. We reprove the familiar fact that the set uf(L) of words having unique factorization into elements of L is regular if L is regular, and from this deduce an…