Related papers: Complexity of regular bifix-free languages
We solve two open problems concerning syntactic complexity: We prove that the cardinality of the syntactic semigroup of a left ideal or a suffix-closed language with $n$ left quotients (that is, with state complexity $n$) is at most…
We describe in this paper a connection between bifix codes, symbolic dynamical systems and free groups. This is in the spirit of the connection established previously for the symbolic systems corresponding to Sturmian words. We introduce a…
We study the fundamental question of how efficiently suffix array entries can be accessed when the array cannot be stored explicitly. The suffix array $SA_T[1..n]$ of a text $T$ of length $n$ encodes the lexicographic order of its suffixes…
We define a family of natural decompositions of Sturmian words in Christoffel words, called *reversible Christoffel* (RC) factorizations. They arise from the observation that two Sturmian words with the same language have (almost always)…
A prefix normal word is a binary word with the property that no substring has more $1$s than the prefix of the same length. By proving that the set of prefix normal words is a bubble language, we can exhaustively list all prefix normal…
We investigate the properties of formal languages expressible in terms of formulas over quantifier-free theories of word equations, arithmetic over length constraints, and language membership predicates for the classes of regular, visibly…
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…
We study finite-state transducers and their power for transforming infinite words. Infinite sequences of symbols are of paramount importance in a wide range of fields, from formal languages to pure mathematics and physics. While finite…
We introduce the finite-horizon first-order rank profile of a language $L \subseteq \Sigma^*$: the least quantifier rank needed by an $\mathrm{FO}[<]$ sentence to classify membership in $L$ correctly on all words of length at most $n$. The…
Sturmian sequences are well-known as the ones having minimal complexity over a 2-letter alphabet. They are also the balanced sequences over a 2-letter alphabet and the sequences describing discrete lines. They are famous and have been…
We generalise a multiple string pattern matching algorithm, recently proposed by Fredriksson and Grabowski [J. Discr. Alg. 7, 2009], to deal with arbitrary dictionaries on an alphabet of size $s$. If $r_m$ is the number of words of length…
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…
We introduce regular language states, a family of quantum many-body states. They are built from a special class of formal languages, called regular, which has been thoroughly studied in the field of computer science. They can be understood…
The rational index of a context-free language $L$ is a function $f(n)$, such that for each regular language $R$ recognized by an automaton with $n$ states, the intersection of $L$ and $R$ is either empty or contains a word shorter than…
We introduce and study a new complexity function in combinatorics on words, which takes into account the smallest second occurrence time of a factor of an infinite word. We characterize the eventually periodic words and the Sturmian words…
We present methods for calculating a measure of phonotactic complexity---bits per phoneme---that permits a straightforward cross-linguistic comparison. When given a word, represented as a sequence of phonemic segments such as symbols in the…
Prefix normal words are binary words in which each prefix has at least the same number of $\so$s as any factor of the same length. Firstly introduced by Fici and Lipt\'ak in 2011, the problem of determining the index of the prefix…
We introduce the Insertion Chain Complex, a higher-dimensional extension of insertion graphs, as a new framework for analyzing finite sets of words. We study its topological and combinatorial properties, in particular its homology groups,…
It is shown that for every language family that is a trio containing only semilinear languages, all bounded languages in it can be accepted by one-way deterministic reversal-bounded multicounter machines (DCM). This implies that for every…
Motivated by DNA storage in living organisms, and by known biological mutation processes, we study the reverse-complement string-duplication system. We fully classify the conditions under which the system has full expressiveness, for all…