Related papers: Quotient Complexity of Closed Languages
We study the syntactic complexity of finite/cofinite, definite and reverse definite languages. The syntactic complexity of a class of languages is defined as the maximal size of syntactic semigroups of languages from the class, taken as a…
For a given language $L$, we study the languages $X$ such that for all distinct words $u, v \in L$, there exists a word $x \in X$ that appears a different number of times as a factor in $u$ and in $v$. In particular, we are interested in…
A language L is closed if L = L*. We consider an operation on closed languages, L-*, that is an inverse to Kleene closure. It is known that if L is closed and regular, then L-* is also regular. We show that the analogous result fails to…
We relate two measures of complexity of regular languages. The first is syntactic complexity, that is, the cardinality of the syntactic semigroup of the language. That semigroup is isomorphic to the semigroup of transformations of states…
We identify a subclass of the regular commutative languages that is closed under the iterated shuffle, or shuffle closure. In particular, it is regularity-preserving on this subclass. This subclass contains the commutative group languages…
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…
Partial words are sequences over a finite alphabet that may contain wildcard symbols, called holes, which match or are compatible with all letters; partial words without holes are said to be full words (or simply words). Given an infinite…
We consider a set of natural operations on languages, and prove that the orbit of any language L under the monoid generated by this set is finite and bounded, independently of L. This generalizes previous results about complement, Kleene…
We compute the exact maximum state complexity for the language consisting of $m$ words of length $N$, and characterize languages achieving the maximum. We also consider a special case, namely languages $C(w)$ consisting of the conjugates of…
Trapezoidal words are words having at most $n+1$ distinct factors of length $n$ for every $n\ge 0$. They therefore encompass finite Sturmian words. We give combinatorial characterizations of trapezoidal words and exhibit a formula for their…
We present two structural results concerning longest common prefixes of non-empty languages. First, we show that the longest common prefix of the language generated by a context-free grammar of size $N$ equals the longest common prefix of…
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…
A finite word $w$ of length $n$ contains at most $n+1$ distinct palindromic factors. If the bound $n+1$ is attained, the word $w$ is called rich. An infinite word $w$ is called rich if every finite factor of $w$ is rich. Let $w$ be a word…
Finite chase, or alternatively chase termination, is an important condition to ensure the decidability of existential rule languages. In the past few years, a number of rule languages with finite chase have been studied. In this work, we…
When can two regular word languages K and L be separated by a simple language? We investigate this question and consider separation by piecewise- and suffix-testable languages and variants thereof. We give characterizations of when two…
We provide an exact estimate on the maximal subword complexity for quasiperiodic infinite words. To this end we give a representation of the set of finite and of infinite words having a certain quasiperiod q via a finite language derived…
We investigate the state complexity of the permutation operation, or the commutative closure, on Alphabetical Pattern Constraints (APC). This class corresponds to level $3/2$ of the Straubing-Th{\'e}rien Hierarchy and includes the finite,…
When a system sends messages through a lossy channel, then the language encoding all sequences of messages can be abstracted by its downward closure, i.e. the set of all (not necessarily contiguous) subwords. This is useful because even if…
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…
For a language $L$, we consider its cyclic closure, and more generally the language $C^k(L)$, which consists of all words obtained by partitioning words from $L$ into $k$ factors and permuting them. We prove that the classes of ET0L and…