Related papers: Partial Derivatives for Context-Free Languages: Fr…
In this thesis we use quasiorders on words to offer a new perspective on two well-studied problems from Formal Language Theory: deciding language inclusion and manipulating the finite automata representations of regular languages. First, we…
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…
In this functional pearl, we examine the use of definitional interpreters as a basis for abstract interpretation of higher-order programming languages. As it turns out, definitional interpreters, especially those written in monadic style,…
We present a new approach to formal language theory using Kolmogorov complexity. The main results presented here are an alternative for pumping lemma(s), a new characterization for regular languages, and a new method to separate…
We introduce and study the repetitive variants of the deterministic and the nondeterministic finite automaton with translucent words (DFAwtw and NFAwtw). On seeing the right sentinel, a repetitive NFAwtw need not halt immediately, accepting…
We design a family of program analyses for JavaScript that make no approximation in matching calls with returns, exceptions with handlers, and breaks with labels. We do so by starting from an established reduction semantics for JavaScript…
Static program analysis is a valuable tool for any programming language that people write programs in. The prevalence of scripting languages in the world suggests programming language interpreters are relatively easy to write. Users of…
The strength of a dynamic language is also its weakness: run-time flexibility comes at the cost of compile-time predictability. Many of the hallmarks of dynamic languages such as closures, continuations, various forms of reflection, and a…
These lecture notes are intended as a supplement to Moore and Mertens' The Nature of Computation or as a standalone resource, and are available to anyone who wants to use them. Comments are welcome, and please let me know if you use these…
We exhibit the construction of a deterministic automaton that, given k > 0, recognizes the (regular) language of k-differentiable words. Our approach follows a scheme of Crochemore et al. based on minimal forbidden words. We extend this…
By representing elements in free fields (over a commutative field and a finite alphabet) using Cohn and Reutenauer's linear representations, we provide an algorithmic construction for the (partial) non-commutative (or Hausdorff-) derivative…
Complementation of finite automata is a basic operation used in numerous applications. The standard way to complement a nondeterministic finite automaton (NFA) is to transform it into an equivalent deterministic finite automaton (DFA) and…
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…
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…
Unambiguous non-deterministic finite automata have intermediate expressive power and succinctness between deterministic and non-deterministic automata. It has been conjectured that every unambiguous non-deterministic one-way finite…
This paper presents a new solution to the containment problem for extended regular expressions that extends basic regular expressions with intersection and complement operators and consider regular expressions on infinite alphabets based on…
The paper is about a class of languages that extends context-free languages (CFL) and is stable under shuffle. Specifically, we investigate the class of partially-commutative context-free languages (PCCFL), where non-terminal symbols are…
Li and Pedrycz [Y. M. Li, W. Pedrycz, Fuzzy finite automata and fuzzy regular expressions with membership values in lattice ordered monoids, Fuzzy Sets and Systems 156 (2005) 68--92] have proved fundamental results that provide different…
We discuss automating the calculation of weak shape derivatives in the Unified Form Language (Aln{\ae}s et al., ACM Trans. Math. Softw., 2014) by introducing an appropriate additional step in the pullback from physical to reference space…
Reward machines (RMs) are automata structures that encode (non-Markovian) reward functions for reinforcement learning (RL). RMs can reward any behaviour representable in regular languages and, when paired with RL algorithms that exploit RM…