Related papers: The complexity of downward closure comparisons
We study a standard operator on classes of languages: unambiguous polynomial closure. We prove that for every class C of regular languages satisfying mild properties, the membership problem for its unambiguous polynomial closure UPol(C)…
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…
When can two regular word languages K and L be separated by a simple language? We investigate this question and consider separation by piecewise- and suffix-testable languages and variants thereof. We give characterizations of when two…
Covering arrays for words of length $t$ over a $d$ letter alphabet are $k \times n$ arrays with entries from the alphabet so that for each choice of $t$ columns, each of the $d^t$ $t$-letter words appears at least once among the rows of the…
We investigate the complexity of LTL learning, which consists in deciding given a finite set of positive ultimately periodic words, a finite set of negative ultimately periodic words, and a bound B given in unary, if there is an LTL-formula…
This paper studies the complexity of operations on finite automata and the complexity of their decision problems when the alphabet is unary. Let $n$ denote the maximum of the number of states of the input finite automata considered in the…
In this paper we examine decision problems associated with various classes of convex languages, studied by Ang and Brzozowski (under the name "continuous languages"). We show that we can decide whether a given language L is prefix-,…
Satisfiability of word equations is an important problem in the intersection of formal languages and algebra: Given two sequences consisting of letters and variables we are to decide whether there is a substitution for the variables that…
In this note we provide a (decidable) graph-structural characterisation of the infiniteness of $L(w_1, ..., w_k)$, where $L(w_1, ..., w_k) = \{w \in A^* | |w|_{w_1} = \cdots = |w|_{w_k}\}$ is the set of all words that contain the same…
A regular language $L$ is said to be prime, if it is not the product of two non-trivial languages. Martens et al. settled the exact complexity of deciding primality for deterministic finite automata in 2010. For finite languages, Mateescu…
This dissertation proves lower bounds on the inherent difficulty of deciding flow analysis problems in higher-order programming languages. We give exact characterizations of the computational complexity of 0CFA, the $k$CFA hierarchy, and…
A language $L$ is the orthogonal catenation of languages $L_1$ and $L_2$ if every word of $L$ can be written in a unique way as a catenation of a word in $L_1$ and a word in $L_2$. We establish a tight bound for the state complexity of…
A subsequence of a word $w$ is a word $u$ such that $u = w[i_1] w[i_2] \dots w[i_{k}]$, for some set of indices $1 \leq i_1 < i_2 < \dots < i_k \leq \lvert w\rvert$. A word $w$ is $k$-subsequence universal over an alphabet $\Sigma$ if every…
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…
We often add arithmetic to extend the expressiveness of query languages and study the complexity of problems such as testing query containment and finding certain answers in the framework of answering queries using views. When adding…
Finite-turn pushdown automata (PDA) are investigated concerning their descriptional complexity. It is known that they accept exactly the class of ultralinear context-free languages. Furthermore, the increase in size when converting…
For a language $L$, we consider its cyclic closure, and more generally the language $C^k(L)$, which consists of all words obtained by partitioning words from $L$ into $k$ factors and permuting them. We prove that the classes of ET0L and…
A locally threshold testable language L is a language with the property that for some non negative integers k and l and for some word u from L, a word v belongs to L if and only if (1) the prefixes [suffixes] of length k-1 of words u and v…
We introduce the notion of multipass automata as a generalization of pushdown automata and study the classes of languages accepted by such machines. The class of languages accepted by deterministic multipass automata is exactly the Boolean…
We study the computational and descriptional complexity of the following transformation: Given a one-counter automaton (OCA) A, construct a nondeterministic finite automaton (NFA) B that recognizes an abstraction of the language L(A): its…