Related papers: Closure properties of predicates recognized by det…
A regular language $L$ is said to be prime, if it is not the product of two non-trivial languages. Martens et al. settled the exact complexity of deciding primality for deterministic finite automata in 2010. For finite languages, Mateescu…
A group is combable if it can be represented by a language of words satisfying a fellow traveller property; an automatic group has a synchronous combing which is a regular language. This paper gives a systematic analysis of the properties…
Inspired by distributed algorithms, we introduce a new class of finite graph automata that recognize precisely the graph languages definable in monadic second-order logic. For the cases of words and trees, it has been long known that the…
A regular language has the zero-one law if its asymptotic density converges to either zero or one. We prove that the class of all zero-one languages is closed under Boolean operations and quotients. Moreover, we prove that a regular…
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…
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…
Weighted automata are nondeterministic automata with numerical weights on transitions. They can define quantitative languages $L$ that assign to each word $w$ a real number $L(w)$. In the case of infinite words, the value of a run is…
We continue our study of open and closed languages. We investigate how the properties of being open and closed are preserved under concatenation. We investigate analogues, in formal languages, of the separation axioms in topological spaces;…
A fundamental theme in automata theory is regular languages of words and trees, and their many equivalent definitions. Salvati has proposed a generalization to regular languages of simply typed $\lambda$-terms, defined using denotational…
We study expression learning problems with syntactic restrictions and introduce the class of finite-aspect checkable languages to characterize symbolic languages that admit decidable learning. The semantics of such languages can be defined…
Previously, self-verifying symmetric difference automata were defined and a tight bound of 2^n-1-1 was shown for state complexity in the unary case. We now consider the non-unary case and show that, for every n at least 2, there is a…
The downward closure of a word language is the set of all (not necessarily contiguous) subwords of its members. It is well-known that the downward closure of any language is regular. While the downward closure appears to be a powerful…
\omega-languages are becoming more and more relevant nowadays when most applications are 'ever-running'. Recent literature, mainly under the motivation of widening the application of model checking techniques, extended the analysis of these…
First-order linear temporal logic (FOLTL) is a flexible and expressive formalism capable of naturally describing complex behaviors and properties. Although the logic is in general highly undecidable, the idea of using it as a specification…
We generalize some of the central results in automata theory to the abstraction level of coalgebras and thus lay out the foundations of a universal theory of automata operating on infinite objects. Let F be any set functor that preserves…
We introduce regular languages of morphisms in free monoidal categories, with their associated grammars and automata. These subsume the classical theory of regular languages of words and trees, but also open up a much wider class of…
Let $k\ge 2$. We prove that the characteristic sequence of a regular language over a $k$-letter alphabet is $k$-automatic. More generally, if $t\ge 2$ and $t,k$ are multiplicatively dependent, we show that the characteristic sequence of a…
These notes present the essentials of first- and second-order monadic logics on strings with introductory purposes. We discuss Monadic First-Order logic and show that it is strictly less expressive than Finite-State Automata, in that it…
We consider the termination/non-termination property of a class of loops. Such loops are commonly used abstractions of real program pieces. Second-order logic is a convenient language to express non-termination. Of course, such property is…
In this article we consider two-way two-tape (alternating) automata accepting pairs of words and we study some closure properties of this model. Our main result is that such alternating automata are not closed under complementation for…