Related papers: Closures in Formal Languages: Concatenation, Separ…
Indexed languages are a classical notion in formal language theory, which has attracted attention in recent decades due to its role in higher-order model checking: They are precisely the languages accepted by order-2 pushdown automata. The…
Given a regular language $L$, we study the language of words $\mathsf{D}(L)$, that distinguish between pairs of different left-quotients of $L$. We characterize this distinguishability operation, show that its iteration has always a fixed…
In this article we undertake a study of extension complexity from the perspective of formal languages. We define a natural way to associate a family of polytopes with binary languages. This allows us to define the notion of extension…
We investigate the polynomial closure operation (C -> Pol(C)) defined on classes of regular languages. We present an interesting and useful connection relating the separation problem for the class C and the membership problem for it…
We consider various shuffling and unshuffling operations on languages and words, and examine their closure properties. Although the main goal is to provide some good and novel exercises and examples for undergraduate formal language theory…
We consider a computational model which is known as set automata. The set automata are one-way finite automata with an additional storage---the set. There are two kinds of set automata---the deterministic and the nondeterministic ones. We…
A group is combable if it can be represented by a language of words satisfying a fellow traveller property; an automatic group has a synchronous combing which is a regular language. This paper gives a systematic analysis of the properties…
Polynomial closure is a standard operator which is applied to a class of regular languages. In the paper, we investigate three restrictions called left (LPol), right (RPol) and mixed polynomial closure (MPol). The first two were known while…
Traditionally, formal languages are defined as sets of words. More recently, the alternative coalgebraic or coinductive representation as infinite tries, i.e., prefix trees branching over the alphabet, has been used to obtain compact and…
The downward and upward closures of a regular language $L$ are obtained by collecting all the subwords and superwords of its elements, respectively. The downward and upward interiors of $L$ are obtained dually by collecting words having all…
One of the main reasons for the correspondence of regular languages and monadic second-order logic is that the class of regular languages is closed under images of surjective letter-to-letter homomorphisms. This closure property holds for…
A closed word (a.k.a. periodic-like word or complete first return) is a word whose longest border does not have internal occurrences, or, equivalently, whose longest repeated prefix is not right special. We investigate the structure of…
We show how to give a coherent semantics to programs that are well-specified in a version of separation logic for a language with higher types: idealized algol extended with heaps (but with immutable stack variables). In particular, we…
In this paper we examine decision problems associated with various classes of convex languages, studied by Ang and Brzozowski (under the name "continuous languages"). We show that we can decide whether a given language L is prefix-,…
We study infinite words fixed by a morphism and their derived words. A derived word is a coding of return words to a factor. We exhibit two examples of sets of morphisms which are closed under derivation --- any derived word with respect to…
We show that for any $i > 0$, it is decidable, given a regular language, whether it is expressible in the $\Sigma_i[<]$ fragment of first-order logic FO[<]. This settles a question open since 1971. Our main technical result relies on the…
A word is closed if it contains a proper factor that occurs both as a prefix and as a suffix but does not have internal occurrences, otherwise it is open. We deal with the sequence of open and closed prefixes of Sturmian words and prove…
In this paper we develop little further the theory of quantum finite automata (QFA). There are already few properties of QFA known, that deterministic and probabilistic finite automata do not have e.g. they cannot recognize all regular…
We show that three fixed point structures equipped with (sequential) composition, a sum operation, and a fixed point operation share the same valid equations. These are the theories of (context-free) languages, (regular) tree languages, and…
We address the separability problem for straight-line string constraints. The separability problem for languages of a class C by a class S asks: given two languages A and B in C, does there exist a language I in S separating A and B (i.e.,…