Related papers: Some connections between universal algebra and log…
We study the question of whether a given regular language of finite trees can be defined in first-order logic. We develop an algebraic approach to address this question and we use it to derive several necessary and sufficient conditions for…
We show that three fixed point structures equipped with (sequential) composition, a sum operation, and a fixed point operation share the same valid equations. These are the theories of (context-free) languages, (regular) tree languages, and…
We use the recently developed theory of forest algebras to find algebraic characterizations of the languages of unranked trees and forests definable in various logics. These include the temporal logics CTL and EF, and first-order logic over…
The study of finite automata and regular languages is a privileged meeting point of algebra and logic. Since the work of Buchi, regular languages have been classified according to their descriptive complexity, i.e. the type of logical…
These are lecture notes on the algebraic approach to regular languages. The classical algebraic approach is for finite words; it uses semigroups instead of automata. However, the algebraic approach can be extended to structures beyond…
The theory of finite automata concerns itself with words in a free monoid together with concatenation and without further structure. There are, however, important applications which use alphabets which are structured in some sense. We…
We study varieties that contain unranked tree languages over all alphabets. Trees are labeled with symbols from two alphabets, an unranked operator alphabet and an alphabet used for leaves only. Syntactic algebras of unranked tree languages…
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…
We propose a generalization of first-order logic originating in a neglected work by C.C. Chang: a natural and generic correspondence language for any types of structures which can be recast as Set-coalgebras. We discuss axiomatization and…
We give an algebraic characterization of the tree languages that are defined by logical formulas using certain Lindstr\"om quantifiers. An important instance of our result concerns first-order definable tree languages. Our characterization…
$\omega$-clones are multi-sorted structures that naturally emerge as algebras for infinite trees, just as $\omega$-semigroups are convenient algebras for infinite words. In the algebraic theory of languages, one hopes that a language is…
The HOM problem, which asks whether the image of a regular tree language under a given tree homomorphism is again regular, is known to be decidable [Godoy & Gim\'enez: The HOM problem is decidable. JACM 60(4), 2013]. However, the problem…
We generalize some of the central results in automata theory to the abstraction level of coalgebras and thus lay out the foundations of a universal theory of automata operating on infinite objects. Let F be any set functor that preserves…
One of the longstanding problems in universal algebra is the question of which finite lattices are isomorphic to the congruence lattices of finite algebras. This question can be phrased as which finite lattices can be represented as…
Lecture notes on tree language theory, in particular recognizable tree languages and finite state tree transformations.
Inspired by distributed algorithms, we introduce a new class of finite graph automata that recognize precisely the graph languages definable in monadic second-order logic. For the cases of words and trees, it has been long known that the…
A fundamental theme in automata theory is regular languages of words and trees, and their many equivalent definitions. Salvati has proposed a generalization to regular languages of simply typed $\lambda$-terms, defined using denotational…
The theory of finite term algebras provides a natural framework to describe the semantics of functional languages. The ability to efficiently reason about term algebras is essential to automate program analysis and verification for…
A logic is presented for reasoning on iterated sequences of formulae over some given base language. The considered sequences, or "schemata", are defined inductively, on some algebraic structure (for instance the natural numbers, the lists,…
We explore from an algebraic viewpoint the properties of the tree languages definable with a first-order formula involving the ancestor predicate, using the description of these languages as those recognized by iterated block products of…