Related papers: Inverse Star, Borders, and Palstars

We consider the class of groups whose word problem is poly-context-free; that is, an intersection of finitely many context-free languages. We show that any group which is virtually a finitely generated subgroup of a direct product of free…

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…

This paper proves a long standing conjecture in formal language theory. It shows that all regular languages are Church-Rosser congruential. The class of Church-Rosser congruential languages was introduced by McNaughton, Narendran, and Otto…

The rational index of a context-free language $L$ is a function $f(n)$, such that for each regular language $R$ recognized by an automaton with $n$ states, the intersection of $L$ and $R$ is either empty or contains a word shorter than…

We survey recent results concerning the complexity of regular languages represented by their minimal deterministic finite automata. In addition to the quotient complexity of the language -- which is the number of its (left) quotients, and…

In 1973, Greibach ("The hardest context-free language", SIAM J. Comp., 1973) constructed a context-free language $L_0$ with the property that every context-free language can be reduced to $L_0$ by a homomorphism, thus representing it as an…

A recent study on structural properties of regular and context-free languages has greatly promoted our basic understandings of the complex behaviors of those languages. We continue the study to examine how regular languages behave when they…

Let $R$ be a commutative integral unital domain and $L$ a free non-commutative Lie algebra over $R$. In this paper we show that the ring $R$ and its action on $L$ are 0-interpretable in $L$, viewed as a ring with the standard ring language…

We consider a general class of decision problems concerning formal languages, called ``(one-dimensional) unboundedness predicates'', for automata that feature reversal-bounded counters (RBCA). We show that each problem in this class reduces…

We find a mismatch between what large language models encode about a causal question and what they answer. On anti-commonsense CLadder items, a fixed linear probe recovers the evidence-supported answer from the model's hidden state…

FC is a first-order logic that reasons over all factors of a finite word using concatenation, and can define non-regular languages like that of all squares (ww). In this paper, we establish that there are regular languages that are not…

In this paper we prove that for any infinite word W whose set of factors is closed under reversal, the following conditions are equivalent: (I) all complete returns to palindromes are palindromes; (II) P(n) + P(n+1) = C(n+1) - C(n) + 2 for…

Let $K,\,H$ be Hilbert spaces and let $L(K,H)$ denote the set of all bounded linear operators from $K$ to $H$. Let $A \in L(H)\triangleq L(H,H)$ with $R(A)$ closed and $X,Y \in L(K,H)$ with $R(X)\subseteq R(A),R(Y)\subseteq R(A^*)$. In this…

A zero-one language L is a regular language whose asymptotic probability converges to either zero or one. In this case, we say that L obeys the zero-one law. We prove that a regular language obeys the zero-one law if and only if its…

Kleene algebra axioms are complete with respect to both language models and binary relation models. In particular, two regular expressions recognise the same language if and only if they are universally equivalent in the model of binary…

We consider extensions of monadic second order logic over $\omega$-words, which are obtained by adding one language that is not $\omega$-regular. We show that if the added language $L$ has a neutral letter, then the resulting logic is…

We introduce the finite-horizon first-order rank profile of a language $L \subseteq \Sigma^*$: the least quantifier rank needed by an $\mathrm{FO}[<]$ sentence to classify membership in $L$ correctly on all words of length at most $n$. The…

Over finite words, languages of dot-depth one are expressively complete for alternation-free first-order logic. This fragment is also known as the Boolean closure of existential first-order logic. Here, the atomic formulas comprise order,…

Given a regular language L, we effectively construct a unary semigroup that recognizes the topological closure of L in the free unary semigroup relative to the variety of unary semigroups generated by the pseudovariety R of all finite…

Context-free languages can be characterized in several ways. This article studies projective linearisations of languages of simple dependency trees, i.e., dependency trees in which a node can govern at most one node with a given syntactic…