Related papers: Closures in Formal Languages: Concatenation, Separ…
We investigate the complexity of the separation problem associated to classes of regular languages. For a class C, C-separation takes two regular languages as input and asks whether there exists a third language in C which includes the…
We investigate a famous decision problem in automata theory: separation. Given a class of language C, the separation problem for C takes as input two regular languages and asks whether there exists a third one which belongs to C, includes…
We study the problem of deciding whether a given language is directed. A language $L$ is \emph{directed} if every pair of words in $L$ have a common (scattered) superword in $L$. Deciding directedness is a fundamental problem in connection…
In single-core processors, concurrency requires that multiple processes be interleaved into a single thread of execution by a scheduler. The language-theoretic operation that corresponds to this is the shuffle of two languages: the set of…
Concatenation hierarchies are classifications of regular languages. All such hierarchies are built through the same construction process: start from an initial class of languages and build new levels using two generic operations.…
A filtration of a formal language L by a sequence s maps L to the set of words formed by taking the letters of words of L indexed only by s. We consider the languages resulting from filtering by all arithmetic progressions. If L is regular,…
A language L is prefix-closed if, whenever a word w is in L, then every prefix of w is also in L. We define suffix-, factor-, and subword-closed languages in the same way, where by subword we mean subsequence. We study the quotient…
Separation is a classical problem asking whether, given two sets belonging to some class, it is possible to separate them by a set from a smaller class. We discuss the separation problem for regular languages. We give a Ptime algorithm to…
Group languages are regular languages recognized by finite groups, or equivalently by finite automata in which each letter induces a permutation on the set of states. We investigate the separation problem for this class of languages: given…
We consider variations on the following problem: given an NFA M and a pattern p, does there exist an x in L(M) such that p matches x? We consider the restricted problem where M only accepts a finite language. We also consider the variation…
Let A be a finite alphabet and let L contained in (A*)^n be an n-variable language over A. We say that L is regular if it is the language accepted by a synchronous n-tape finite state automaton, it is quasi-regular if it is accepted by an…
We introduce the notions of topological entropy of a formal language and of a topological automaton. We show that the entropy function is surjective and bound the entropy of languages accepted by deterministic {\epsilon}-free push-down…
The downward closure of a word language is the set of all (not necessarily contiguous) subwords of its members. It is well-known that the downward closure of any language is regular. While the downward closure appears to be a powerful…
A famous theorem of Kuratowski states that in a topological space, at most 14 distinct sets can be produced by repeatedly applying the operations of closure and complement to a given set. We re-examine this theorem in the setting of formal…
We introduce a flexible class of well-quasi-orderings (WQOs) on words that generalizes the ordering of (not necessarily contiguous) subwords. Each such WQO induces a class of piecewise testable languages (PTLs) as Boolean combinations of…
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…
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…
Regular nested word languages (a.k.a. visibly pushdown languages) strictly extend regular word languages, while preserving their main closure and decidability properties. Previous works have shown that considering languages of 2-nested…
We investigate the intersection problem for finite monoids, which asks for a given set of regular languages, represented by recognizing morphisms to finite monoids from a variety V, whether there exists a word contained in their…
Separation is a classical problem in mathematics and computer science. It asks whether, given two sets belonging to some class, it is possible to separate them by another set of a smaller class. We present and discuss the separation problem…