Related papers: Finite Orbits of Language Operations
The syntactic monoid of a language is generalized to the level of a symmetric monoidal closed category D. This allows for a uniform treatment of several notions of syntactic algebras known in the literature, including the syntactic monoids…
We investigate the orbits of automaton semigroups and groups to obtain algorithmic and structural results, both for general automata but also for some special subclasses. First, we show that a more general version of the finiteness problem…
The clone of term operations of an algebraic structure consists of all operations that can be expressed by a term in the language of the structure. We consider bounds for the length and the height of the terms expressing these functions,…
We study expressibility in infinitary languages of the modal operators associated with satisfiability of sentences of these languages in submodels and extensions of models. We give a syntactic criterion for expressibility in finitary…
An algebra is finitely related (or has finite degree) if its term functions are determined by some finite set of finitary relations. Nilpotent monoids built from words, via Rees quotients of free monoids, have been used to exhibit many…
We show that, for each finite algebra A, either it has symmetric term operations of all arities or else some finite algebra in the variety generated by A has two automorphisms without a common fixed point. We also show this two-automorphism…
We consider a language together with the subword relation, the cover relation, and regular predicates. For such structures, we consider the extension of first-order logic by threshold- and modulo-counting quantifiers. Depending on the…
We prove that the orbit closure of the determinant is not normal. A similar result is obtained for the orbit closure of the permanent multiplied by a power of a linear form.
We study orbit-finite systems of linear equations, in the setting of sets with atoms. Our principal contribution is a decision procedure for solvability of such systems. The procedure works for every field (and even commutative ring) under…
We characterize the infinite words determined by indexed languages. An infinite language $L$ determines an infinite word $\alpha$ if every string in $L$ is a prefix of $\alpha$. If $L$ is regular or context-free, it is known that $\alpha$…
We characterize the finite sets S of words such that that the iterated shuffle of S is co-finite and we give some bounds on the length of a longest word not in the iterated shuffle of S.
We show that the commutative closure combined with the iterated shuffle is a regularity-preserving operation on group languages. In particular, for commutative group languages, the iterated shuffle is a regularity-preserving operation. We…
The (bounded) hairpin completion and its iterated versions are operations on formal lan- guages which have been inspired by the hairpin formation in DNA-biochemistry. The paper answers two questions asked in the literature about the…
Indexed languages are a classical notion in formal language theory, which has attracted attention in recent decades due to its role in higher-order model checking: They are precisely the languages accepted by order-2 pushdown automata. The…
A famous theorem of Kuratowski states that in a topological space, at most 14 distinct sets can be produced by repeatedly applying the operations of closure and complement to a given set. We re-examine this theorem in the setting of formal…
We characterize all pairs of completely multiplicative functions $f,g:\mathbb{N}\to\mathbb{T}$ such that the orbit closure \[\overline{\{(f(n),g(n+1))\}_{n\ge 1}} \neq \mathbb{T}\times \mathbb{T}.\] In so doing, we settle an old conjecture…
We show that for any $i > 0$, it is decidable, given a regular language, whether it is expressible in the $\Sigma_i[<]$ fragment of first-order logic FO[<]. This settles a question open since 1971. Our main technical result relies on the…
The hairpin completion is an operation on formal languages which is inspired by the hairpin formation in biochemistry. Hairpin formations occur naturally within DNA-computing. It has been known that the hairpin completion of a regular…
We introduce formal languages over infinite alphabets where words may contain binders. We define the notions of nominal language, nominal monoid, and nominal regular expressions. Moreover, we extend history-dependent automata (HD-automata)…
The theory of finite automata concerns itself with words in a free monoid together with concatenation and without further structure. There are, however, important applications which use alphabets which are structured in some sense. We…