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Whether language models (LMs) have inductive biases that favor typologically frequent grammatical properties over rare, implausible ones has been investigated, typically using artificial languages (ALs) (White and Cotterell, 2021;…
We study the task, for a given language $L$, of enumerating the (generally infinite) sequence of its words, without repetitions, while bounding the delay between two consecutive words. To allow for delay bounds that do not depend on the…
In this paper we present a lexicon-based approach to the problem of morphological processing. Full-form words, lemmas and grammatical tags are interconnected in a DAWG. Thus, the process of analysis/synthesis is reduced to a search in the…
Graph Interpolation Grammars are a declarative formalism with an operational semantics. Their goal is to emulate salient features of the human parser, and notably incrementality. The parsing process defined by GIGs incrementally builds a…
Given a regular language $L$, we study the language of words $\mathsf{D}(L)$, that distinguish between pairs of different left-quotients of $L$. We characterize this distinguishability operation, show that its iteration has always a fixed…
Large Language Models (LLMs) have become capable of generating highly fluent text in certain languages, without modules specially designed to capture grammar or semantic coherence. What does this mean for the future of linguistic expertise…
In this article, we present a fresh perspective on language, combining ideas from various sources, but mixed in a new synthesis. As in the minimalist program, the question is whether we can formulate an elegant formalism, a universal…
We investigate regular realizability (RR) problems, which are the problems of verifying whether intersection of a regular language -- the input of the problem -- and fixed language called filter is non-empty. We consider two kind of…
This thesis explores how concepts of formal language theory can be used to study left-orderable groups. It analyses the languages formed by their positive cones and demonstrates how the abstract families of languages (AFLs) in the Chomsky…
This work is concerned with regular languages defined over large alphabets, either infinite or just too large to be expressed enumeratively. We define a generic model where transitions are labeled by elements of a finite partition of the…
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…
Human languages have evolved to be structured through repeated language learning and use. These processes introduce biases that operate during language acquisition and shape linguistic systems toward communicative efficiency. In this paper,…
A quantitative method is suggested, where meanings of words, and grammatic rules about these, of a vocabulary are represented by real numbers. People meet randomly, and average their vocabularies if they are equal; otherwise they either…
In this paper, we study a series of algorithmic problems related to the subsequences occurring in the strings of a given language, under the assumption that this language is succinctly represented by a grammar generating it, or an automaton…
We study the problem of deciding whether a given language is directed. A language $L$ is \emph{directed} if every pair of words in $L$ have a common (scattered) superword in $L$. Deciding directedness is a fundamental problem in connection…
This article is a sketch of ideas that were once intended to appear in the author's famous series, "The Art of Computer Programming". He generalizes the notion of a context-free language from a set to a multiset of words over an alphabet.…
The paper completely characterizes the primality of acyclic DFAs, where a DFA $\mathcal{A}$ is prime if there do not exist DFAs $\mathcal{A}_1,\dots,\mathcal{A}_t$ with $\mathcal{L}(\mathcal{A}) = \bigcap_{i=1}^{t}…
We investigate the number of sets of words that can be formed from a finite alphabet, counted by the total length of the words in the set. An explicit expression for the counting sequence is derived from the generating function, and…
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…
A generate and test algorithm is described which parses a surface form into one or more lexical entries using linearly ordered phonological rules. This algorithm avoids the exponential expansion of search space which a naive parsing…