Related papers: Immunity and Pseudorandomness of Context-Free Lang…
The primary use of any probabilistic model involving a set of random variables is to run inference and sampling queries on it. Inference queries in classical probabilistic models is concerned by the computation of marginal or conditional…
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…
It is known that if a B\"uchi context-free language (BCFL) consists of scattered words, then there is an integer $n$, depending only on the language, such that the Hausdorff rank of each word in the language is bounded by $n$. Every BCFL is…
During their first years of life, infants learn the language(s) of their environment at an amazing speed despite large cross cultural variations in amount and complexity of the available language input. Understanding this simple fact still…
We show the surprising result that the cutpoint isolation problem is decidable for Probabilistic Finite Automata (PFA) where input words are taken from a letter-bounded context-free language. A context-free language $\mathcal{L}$ is…
We consider the set of infinite real traces, over a dependence alphabet (Gamma, D) with no isolated letter, equipped with the topology induced by the prefix metric. We then prove that all rational languages of infinite real traces are…
We analyze the proof by Lehnert and Schweitzer that the word problem of the Thompson group V is co-context-free, and we show that this word problem is the complement of the cyclic closure of a union of reverse deterministic context-free…
Probabilistic context-free grammars (PCFGs) are used to define distributions over strings, and are powerful modelling tools in a number of areas, including natural language processing, software engineering, model checking, bio-informatics,…
We study the state complexity of regular operations in the class of ideal languages. A language L over an alphabet Sigma is a right (left) ideal if it satisfies L = L Sigma* (L = Sigma* L). It is a two-sided ideal if L = Sigma* L Sigma *,…
A language $L$ over an alphabet $\Sigma$ is suffix-convex if, for any words $x,y,z\in\Sigma^*$, whenever $z$ and $xyz$ are in $L$, then so is $yz$. Suffix-convex languages include three special cases: left-ideal, suffix-closed, and…
These lecture notes are intended as a supplement to Moore and Mertens' The Nature of Computation or as a standalone resource, and are available to anyone who wants to use them. Comments are welcome, and please let me know if you use these…
Reversible forms of computations are often interesting from an energy efficiency point of view. When the computation device in question is an automaton, it is known that the minimal reversible automaton recognizing a given language is not…
Context-Free Grammars (CFGs) and Parsing Expression Grammars (PEGs) have several similarities and a few differences in both their syntax and semantics, but they are usually presented through formalisms that hinder a proper comparison. In…
Slang is a common type of informal language, but its flexible nature and paucity of data resources present challenges for existing natural language systems. We take an initial step toward machine generation of slang by developing a…
We show that for any monoid M, the family of languages accepted by M-automata (or equivalently, generated by regular valence grammars over M) is completely determined by that part of M which lies outside the maximal ideal. Hence, every such…
We study structural restrictions on biautomata such as, e.g., acyclicity, permutation-freeness, strongly permutation-freeness, and orderability, to mention a few. We compare the obtained language families with those induced by deterministic…
By virtue of linguistic compositionality, few syntactic rules and a finite lexicon can generate an unbounded number of sentences. That is, language, though seemingly high-dimensional, can be explained using relatively few degrees of…
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to solve complex tasks where they must retrieve and compose many pieces of in-context information in long reasoning chains. For many real-world tasks it is hard to accurately gauge how…
We study pseudorandomness and pseudorandom generators from the perspective of logical definability. Building on results from ordinary derandomization and finite model theory, we show that it is possible to deterministically construct, in…
We study the notion of sparseness for regular languages over finite trees and infinite words. A language of trees is called sparse if the relative number of $n$-node trees in the language tends to zero, and a language of infinite words is…