Related papers: An approach to computing downward closures
The density of a rational language can be understood as the frequency of some "pattern" in the shift space, for example a pattern like "words with an even number of a given letter." We study the density of group languages, i.e. rational…
We define compact automata and show that every language has a unique minimal compact automaton. We also define recognition of languages by compact left semitopological monoids and construct the analogue of the syntactic monoid in this…
Counters that hold natural numbers are ubiquitous in modeling and verifying software systems; for example, they model dynamic creation and use of resources in concurrent programs. Unfortunately, such discrete counters often lead to…
We survey recent results concerning the complexity of regular languages represented by their minimal deterministic finite automata. In addition to the quotient complexity of the language -- which is the number of its (left) quotients, and…
An attractive mechanism to specify global constraints in rostering and other domains is via formal languages. For instance, the Regular and Grammar constraints specify constraints in terms of the languages accepted by an automaton and a…
Consider $ A^* $, the free monoid generated by the finite alphabet $A$ with the concatenation operation. Two words have the same commutative image when one is a permutation of the symbols of the other. The commutative closure of a set $ L…
Let $\Lambda^{\ast}$ be the free monoid of (finite) words over a not necessarily finite alphabet $\Lambda$, which is equipped with some (partial) order. This ordering lifts to $\Lambda^{\ast}$, where it extends the divisibility ordering of…
We investigate the state complexity of the upward and downward closure and interior operations on commutative regular languages. Then, we systematically study the state complexity of these operations and of the shuffle operation on…
In this paper we study the asymptotic behaviour of two relatively new complexity functions defined on infinite words and their relationship to periodicity. Given a factor $u$ of an infinite word $x$, we say $u$ is closed if it is a letter…
An automaton is unambiguous if for every input it has at most one accepting computation. An automaton is k-ambiguous (for k > 0) if for every input it has at most k accepting computations. An automaton is boundedly ambiguous if it is…
A word-to-word function is rational if it can be realized by a non-deterministic one-way transducer. Over finite words, it is a classical result that any rational function is regular, i.e. it can be computed by a deterministic two-way…
Jumping automata are finite automata that read their input in a non-consecutive manner, disregarding the order of the letters in the word. We introduce and study jumping automata over infinite words. Unlike the setting of finite words,…
Quantitative languages are an extension of boolean languages that assign to each word a real number. Mean-payoff automata are finite automata with numerical weights on transitions that assign to each infinite path the long-run average of…
The avoidability, or unavoidability of patterns in words over finite alphabets has been studied extensively. A word (pattern) over a finite set is said to be unavoidable if, for all but finitely many words, there exists a morphism mapping…
The infimal prefix-closed, controllable and observable superlanguage plays an essential role in the relationship between controllability, observability and co-observability -- the central notions of supervisory control theory. Existing…
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…
We consider the embedding problem in coding theory: given an independence (a code-related property) and an independent language $L$, find a maximal independent language containing $L$. We consider the case where the code-related property is…
Logic languages based on the theory of rational, possibly infinite, trees have much appeal in that rational trees allow for faster unification (due to the safe omission of the occurs-check) and increased expressivity (cyclic terms can…
A class of languages C is perfect if it is closed under Boolean operations and the emptiness problem is decidable. Perfect language classes are the basis for the automata-theoretic approach to model checking: a system is correct if the…
A closed word (a.k.a. periodic-like word or complete first return) is a word whose longest border does not have internal occurrences, or, equivalently, whose longest repeated prefix is not right special. We investigate the structure of…