Related papers: Regular Languages are Church-Rosser Congruential
We consider some questions about formal languages that arise when inverses of letters, words and languages are defined. The reduced representation of a language over the free monoid is its unique equivalent representation in the free group.…
Splicing as a binary word/language operation is inspired by the DNA recombination under the action of restriction enzymes and ligases, and was first introduced by Tom Head in 1987. Shortly thereafter, it was proven that the languages…
Previous results on proving confluence for Constraint Handling Rules are extended in two ways in order to allow a larger and more realistic class of CHR programs to be considered confluent. Firstly, we introduce the relaxed notion of…
We study counting-regular languages -- these are languages $L$ for which there is a regular language $L'$ such that the number of strings of length $n$ in $L$ and $L'$ are the same for all $n$. We show that the languages accepted by…
The separability problem for word languages of a class $\mathcal{C}$ by languages of a class $\mathcal{S}$ asks, for two given languages $I$ and $E$ from $\mathcal{C}$, whether there exists a language $S$ from $\mathcal{S}$ that includes…
In this paper, we prove decidability properties and new results on the position of the family of languages generated by (circular) splicing systems within the Chomsky hierarchy. The two main results of the paper are the following. First, we…
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…
We prove that all standard subregular language classes are linearly separable when represented by their deciding predicates. This establishes finite observability and guarantees learnability with simple linear models. Synthetic experiments…
The formalization of process algebras usually starts with a minimal core of operators and rules for its transition system, and then relax the system to improve its usability and ease the proofs. In the calculus of communicating systems…
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…
In the theory of formal languages, the understanding of concatenation hierarchies of regular languages is one of the most fundamental and challenging topic. In this paper, we survey progress made in the comprehension of this problem since…
We introduce a subclass of the commutative regular languages that is characterized by the property that the state set of the minimal deterministic automaton can be written as a certain Cartesian product. This class behaves much better with…
Futrell and Mahowald (2025) frame the success of neural language models (LMs) as supporting gradient, usage-based linguistic theories. I argue that LMs can also instantiate theories based on formal structures - the types of theories seen in…
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…
We identify a subclass of the regular commutative languages that is closed under the iterated shuffle, or shuffle closure. In particular, it is regularity-preserving on this subclass. This subclass contains the commutative group languages…
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…
A language L is closed if L = L*. We consider an operation on closed languages, L-*, that is an inverse to Kleene closure. It is known that if L is closed and regular, then L-* is also regular. We show that the analogous result fails to…
Let $c>1$ be a real constant. We say that a language $L$ is $c$-\emph{constantly growing} if for every word $u\in L$ there is a word $v\in L$ with $\vert u\vert<\vert v\vert\leq c+\vert u\vert$. We say that a language $L$ is…
This paper explores the fine-grained structure of classes of regular languages maintainable in fragments of first-order logic within the dynamic descriptive complexity framework of Patnaik and Immerman. A result by Hesse states that the…
This paper proposes a definition of recognizable transducers over monads and comonads, which bridges two important ongoing efforts in the current research on regularity. The first effort is the study of regular transductions, which extends…