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Piecewise testable languages form the first level of the Straubing-Th\'erien hierarchy. The membership problem for this level is decidable and testing if the language of a DFA is piecewise testable is NL-complete. The question has not yet…
The infimal prefix-closed, controllable and observable superlanguage plays an essential role in the relationship between controllability, observability and co-observability -- the central notions of supervisory control theory. Existing…
Predicate logic is the premier choice for specifying classes of relational structures. Homomorphisms are key to describing correspondences between relational structures. Questions concerning the interdependencies between these two means of…
Given a class C of word languages, the C-separation problem asks for an algorithm that, given as input two regular languages, decides whether there exists a third language in C containing the first language, while being disjoint from the…
In this paper we consider block languages, namely sets of words having the same length, and study the deterministic and nondeterministic state complexity of several operations on these languages. Being a subclass of finite languages, the…
In the constrained synchronization problem we ask if a given automaton admits a synchronizing word coming from a fixed regular constraint language. We show that intersecting a given constraint language with an ideal language decreases the…
We study the complexity of basic regular operations on languages represented by incomplete deterministic or nondeterministic automata, in which all states are final. Such languages are known to be prefix-closed. We get tight bounds on both…
We answer two open questions by (Gruber, Holzer, Kutrib, 2009) on the state-complexity of representing sub- or superword closures of context-free grammars (CFGs): (1) We prove a (tight) upper bound of $2^{\mathcal{O}(n)}$ on the size of…
We consider fragments of first-order logic and as models we allow finite and infinite words simultaneously. The only binary relations apart from equality are order comparison < and the successor predicate +1. We give characterizations of…
We introduce an operator on classes of regular languages, the star-free closure. Our motivation is to generalize standard results of automata theory within a unified framework. Given an arbitrary input class $C$, the star-free closure…
Closure conversion is a program transformation at work in compilers for functional languages to turn inner functions into global ones, by building closures pairing the transformed functions with the environment of their free variables.…
The problem DFA-Intersection-Nonemptiness asks if a given number of deterministic automata accept a common word. In general, this problem is PSPACE-complete. Here, we investigate this problem for the subclasses of commutative automata and…
We investigate two problems for a class C of regular word languages. The C-membership problem asks for an algorithm to decide whether an input language belongs to C. The C-separation problem asks for an algorithm that, given as input two…
Constraint Logic Programming (CLP) is a language scheme for combining two declarative paradigms: constraint solving and logic programming. Concurrent Constraint Programming (CCP) is a declarative model for concurrency where agents interact…
Commutative languages with the semilinear property (SLIP) can be naturally recognized by real-time NLOG-SPACE multi-counter machines. We show that unions and concatenations of such languages can be similarly recognized, relying on -- and…
Two languages are "finitely different" if their symmetric difference is finite. We consider the DFAs of finitely different regular languages and find major structural similarities. We proceed to consider the smallest DFAs that recognize a…
We develop and explore the idea of recognition of languages (in the general sense of subsets of topological algebras) as preimages of clopen sets under continuous homomorphisms into Stone topological algebras. We obtain an Eilenberg…
Given two languages, a separator is a third language that contains the first one and is disjoint from the second one. We investigate the following decision problem: given two regular input languages of finite words, decide whether there…
A deterministic finite automaton is said to be synchronizing if it has a reset word, i.e. a word that brings all states of the automaton to a particular one. We prove that it is a PSPACE-complete problem to check whether the language of…
We report some further developments regarding the language theory of higher-dimensional automata (HDAs). Regular languages of HDAs are sets of finite interval partially ordered multisets (pomsets) with interfaces. We show a pumping lemma…