Related papers: Minimal Nondeterministic Finite Automata and Atoms…
We show that every regular language defines a unique nondeterministic finite automaton (NFA), which we call "\'atomaton", whose states are the "atoms" of the language, that is, non-empty intersections of complemented or uncomplemented left…
The concept of Deterministic Finite Cover Automata (DFCA) was introduced at WIA '98, as a more compact representation than Deterministic Finite Automata (DFA) for finite languages. In some cases representing a finite language,…
This paper presents and analyzes an incremental algorithm for the construction of Acyclic Non-deterministic Finite-state Automata (NFA). Automata of this type are quite useful in computational linguistics, especially for storing lexicons.…
We examine questions involving nondeterministic finite automata where all states are final, initial, or both initial and final. First, we prove hardness results for the nonuniversality and inequivalence problems for these NFAs. Next, we…
A process algebra is proposed, whose semantics maps a term to a nondeterministic finite automaton (NFA, for short). We prove a representability theorem: for each NFA $N$, there exists a process algebraic term $p$ such that its semantics is…
Compact representations of automata are important for efficiency. In this paper, we study methods to compute reduced automata, in which no two states accept the same language. We do this for finitary automata (FA), an abstract definition…
Affine finite automata (AfA) can be more succinct than probabilistic and quantum finite automata when recognizing some regular languages with bounded-error. In this paper, we improve previously known constructions given for the succinctness…
We define a new subclass of nondeterministic finite automata for prefix-closed languages called Flanked Finite Automata (FFA). We show that this class enjoys good complexity properties while preserving the succinctness of nondeterministic…
Wheeler nondeterministic finite automata (WNFAs) were introduced as a generalization of prefix sorting from strings to labeled graphs. WNFAs admit optimal solutions to classic hard problems on labeled graphs and languages. The problem of…
Determining the minimum number of states required by a finite automaton to separate a given pair of different words is an important problem. In this paper, we consider this problem for quantum automata (QFAs). We show that 2-state QFAs can…
In this paper, we present a proof of the NP-completeness of computing the smallest Deterministic Finite Automaton (DFA) that distinguishes two given regular languages as DFAs. A distinguishing DFA is an automaton that recognizes a language…
The problem of k-minimisation for a DFA M is the computation of a smallest DFA N (where the size |M| of a DFA M is the size of the domain of the transition function) such that their recognized languages differ only on words of length less…
This paper establishes a lower bound on the number of states necessary in the worst case to simulate an $n$-state two-way nondeterministic finite automaton (2NFA) by a one-way unambiguous finite automaton (UFA). It is proved that for every…
It is an open problem to characterize the class of languages recognized by quantum finite automata (QFA). We examine some necessary and some sufficient conditions for a (regular) language to be recognizable by a QFA. For a subclass of…
Finite automata (FA) are a fundamental computational abstraction that is widely used in practice for various tasks in computer science, linguistics, biology, electrical engineering, and artificial intelligence. Given an input word, an FA…
Regular expressions (res), because of their succinctness and clear syntax, are the common choice to represent regular languages. However, efficient pattern matching or word recognition depend on the size of the equivalent nondeterministic…
Grammatical inference consists in learning a formal grammar as a finite state machine or as a set of rewrite rules. In this paper, we are concerned with inferring Nondeterministic Finite Automata (NFA) that must accept some words, and…
The atoms of a regular language are non-empty intersections of complemented and uncomplemented quotients of the language. Tight upper bounds on the number of atoms of a language and on the quotient complexities of atoms are known. We…
Non-deterministic Finite Automata (NFA) represent regular languages concisely, increasing their appeal for applications such as word recognition. This paper proposes a new approach to generate NFA from an interaction language such as UML…
The nondeterministic quantum finite automaton (NQFA) is the only known case where a one-way quantum finite automaton (QFA) model has been shown to be strictly superior in terms of language recognition power to its probabilistic counterpart.…