Related papers: The complexity of downward closure comparisons
The downward closure of a word language is the set of all (not necessarily contiguous) subwords of its members. It is well-known that the downward closure of any language is regular. While the downward closure appears to be a powerful…
The downward closure of a language $L$ of words is the set of all (not necessarily contiguous) subwords of members of $L$. It is well known that the downward closure of any language is regular. Although the downward closure seems to be a…
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…
The downward and upward closures of a regular language $L$ are obtained by collecting all the subwords and superwords of its elements, respectively. The downward and upward interiors of $L$ are obtained dually by collecting words having all…
When a system sends messages through a lossy channel, then the language encoding all sequences of messages can be abstracted by its downward closure, i.e. the set of all (not necessarily contiguous) subwords. This is useful because even if…
This paper investigates the state complexities of subword-closed and superword-closed languages, comparing them to regular languages. We focus on the square root operator and the substitution operator. We establish an exponential lower…
A language L is prefix-closed if, whenever a word w is in L, then every prefix of w is also in L. We define suffix-, factor-, and subword-closed languages in the same way, where by subword we mean subsequence. We study the quotient…
We show the diagonal problem for higher-order pushdown automata (HOPDA), and hence the simultaneous unboundedness problem, is decidable. From recent work by Zetzsche this means that we can construct the downward closure of the set of words…
We study the size and the complexity of computing finite state automata (FSA) representing and approximating the downward and the upward closure of Petri net languages with coverability as the acceptance condition. We show how to construct…
We introduce a flexible class of well-quasi-orderings (WQOs) on words that generalizes the ordering of (not necessarily contiguous) subwords. Each such WQO induces a class of piecewise testable languages (PTLs) as Boolean combinations of…
We investigate the state complexity of the permutation operation, or the commutative closure, on Alphabetical Pattern Constraints (APC). This class corresponds to level $3/2$ of the Straubing-Th{\'e}rien Hierarchy and includes the finite,…
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…
In this work we prove decidability of the model-checking problem for safe recursion schemes against properties defined by alternating B-automata. We then exploit this result to show how to compute downward closures of languages of finite…
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.…
Finite automata whose computations can be reversed, at any point, by knowing the last k symbols read from the input, for a fixed k, are considered. These devices and their accepted languages are called k-reversible automata and k-reversible…
We consider a general class of decision problems concerning formal languages, called ``(one-dimensional) unboundedness predicates'', for automata that feature reversal-bounded counters (RBCA). We show that each problem in this class reduces…
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 explore a new hierarchy of classes of languages and infinite words and its connection with complexity classes. Namely, we say that a language belongs to the class $L_k$ if it is a subset of the catenation of $k$ languages…
Let A be a finite alphabet and let L contained in (A*)^n be an n-variable language over A. We say that L is regular if it is the language accepted by a synchronous n-tape finite state automaton, it is quasi-regular if it is accepted by an…
We study the language inclusion problem $L_1 \subseteq L_2$ where $L_1$ is regular or context-free. Our approach relies on abstract interpretation and checks whether an overapproximating abstraction of $L_1$, obtained by overapproximating…