Related papers: Around Dot-depth One
We consider first-order logic over the subword ordering on finite words, where each word is available as a constant. Our first result is that the $\Sigma_1$ theory is undecidable (already over two letters). We investigate the decidability…
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…
We investigate the decidability of the definability problem for fragments of first order logic over finite words enriched with modular predicates. Our approach aims toward the most generic statements that we could achieve, which…
We examine deterministic and nondeterministic state complexities of regular operations on prefix-free languages. We strengthen several results by providing witness languages over smaller alphabets, usually as small as possible. We next…
Given two languages, a separator is a third language that contains the first one and is disjoint from the second one. We investigate the following decision problem: given two regular input languages of finite words, decide whether there…
We consider the class of languages defined in the 2-variable fragment of the first-order logic of the linear order. Many interesting characterizations of this class are known, as well as the fact that restricting the number of quantifier…
We investigate quantifier alternation hierarchies in first-order logic on finite words. Levels in these hierarchies are defined by counting the number of quantifier alternations in formulas. We prove that one can decide membership of a…
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…
The uniform one-dimensional fragment of first-order logic, U1, is a formalism that extends two-variable logic in a natural way to contexts with relations of all arities. We survey properties of U1 and investigate its relationship to…
A linear ordering is called context-free if it is the lexicographic ordering of some context-free language and is called scattered if it has no dense subordering. Each scattered ordering has an associated ordinal, called its rank. It is…
The study of various decision problems for logic fragments has a long history in computer science. This paper is on the membership problem for a fragment of first-order logic over infinite words; the membership problem asks for a given…
We introduce an operator on classes of regular languages, the star-free closure. Our motivation is to generalize standard results of automata theory within a unified framework. Given an arbitrary input class $C$, the star-free closure…
We characterize the languages in the individual levels of the quantifier alternation hierarchy of first-order logic with two variables by identities. This implies decidability of the individual levels. More generally we show that the…
We stratify intuitionistic first-order logic over $(\forall,\to)$ into fragments determined by the alternation of positive and negative occurrences of quantifiers (Mints hierarchy). We study the decidability and complexity of these…
We survey recent results on the topological complexity of context-free omega-languages which form the second level of the Chomsky hierarchy of languages of infinite words. In particular, we consider the Borel hierarchy and the Wadge…
The spectrum of a first-order logic sentence is the set of natural numbers that are cardinalities of its finite models. In this paper we study the hierarchy of first-order spectra based on the number of variables. It has been conjectured…
We consider two-variable first-order logic FO2 over infinite words. Restricting the number of nested negations defines an infinite hierarchy; its levels are often called the half-levels of the FO2 quantifier alternation hierarchy. For every…
We describe two formalisms for defining graph languages, and prove that they are equivalent: 1. Separator logic. This is first-order logic on graphs which is allowed to use the edge relation, and for every $n \in \{0,1,\ldots \}$ a relation…
The regular languages with a neutral letter expressible in first-order logic with one alternation are characterized. Specifically, it is shown that if an arbitrary $\Sigma_2$ formula defines a regular language with a neutral letter, then…
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…