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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…
A regular language $L$ is union-free if it can be represented by a regular expression without the union operation. A union-free language is deterministic if it can be accepted by a deterministic one-cycle-free-path finite automaton; this is…
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…
In this paper we study the asymptotic behaviour of two relatively new complexity functions defined on infinite words and their relationship to periodicity. Given a factor $u$ of an infinite word $x$, we say $u$ is closed if it is a letter…
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…
This paper investigates the state complexities of subword-closed and superword-closed languages, comparing them to regular languages. We focus on the square root operator and the substitution operator. We establish an exponential lower…
The state complexity of a regular language is the number of states in the minimal deterministic automaton accepting the language. The syntactic complexity of a regular language is the cardinality of its syntactic semigroup. The syntactic…
In this paper we consider the computational complexity of the following problems: given a DFA or NFA representing a regular language L over a finite alphabet Sigma is the set of all prefixes (resp., suffixes, factors, subwords) of all words…
The atoms of a regular language are non-empty intersections of complemented and uncomplemented quotients of the language. Tight upper bounds on the number of atoms of a language and on the quotient complexities of atoms are known. We…
A cross-bifix-free code is a set of words in which no prefix of any length of any word is the suffix of any word in the set. Cross-bifix-free codes arise in the study of distributed sequences for frame synchronization. We provide a new…
A set of words, also called a language, is letter-balanced if the number of occurrences of each letter only depends on the length of the word, up to a constant. Similarly, a language is factor-balanced if the difference of the number of…
We consider the following problem. Let us fix a finite alphabet A; for any given d-uple of letter frequencies, how to construct an infinite word u over the alphabet A satisfying the following conditions: u has linear complexity function, u…
The set of finite words over a well-quasi-ordered set is itself well-quasi-ordered. This seminal result by Higman is a cornerstone of the theory of well-quasi-orderings and has found numerous applications in computer science. However, this…
We solve an open problem concerning syntactic complexity: We prove that the cardinality of the syntactic semigroup of a suffix-free language with $n$ left quotients (that is, with state complexity $n$) is at most $(n-1)^{n-2}+n-2$ for $n\ge…
The state complexity of a regular language is the number of states in a minimal deterministic finite automaton accepting the language. The syntactic complexity of a regular language is the cardinality of its syntactic semigroup. The…
Inspired by a series of papers initiated in 2015 by Berth\'e et al., we introduce a new condition called suffix-connectedness. We show that the groups generated by the return sets of a uniformly recurrent suffix-connected language lie in a…
The syntactic complexity of a regular language is the cardinality of its syntactic semigroup. The syntactic complexity of a subclass of regular languages is the maximal syntactic complexity of languages in that subclass, taken as a function…
A prefix code L satisfies the condition that no word of L is a proper prefix of another word of L. Recently, Ko, Han and Salomaa relaxed this condition by allowing a word of L to be a proper prefix of at most k words of L, for some `margin'…
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…
A language $L$ is the orthogonal catenation of languages $L_1$ and $L_2$ if every word of $L$ can be written in a unique way as a catenation of a word in $L_1$ and a word in $L_2$. We establish a tight bound for the state complexity of…