Related papers: Complexity of Infimal Observable Superlanguages
Descriptional complexity is the study of the conciseness of the various models representing formal languages. The state complexity of a regular language is the size, measured by the number of states of the smallest, either deterministic or…
Indexing strings via prefix (or suffix) sorting is, arguably, one of the most successful algorithmic techniques developed in the last decades. Can indexing be extended to languages? The main contribution of this paper is to initiate the…
The state complexity of a regular language is the number of states in the minimal deterministic automaton accepting the language. The syntactic complexity of a regular language is the cardinality of its syntactic semigroup. The syntactic…
We study the syntactic complexity of finite/cofinite, definite and reverse definite languages. The syntactic complexity of a class of languages is defined as the maximal size of syntactic semigroups of languages from the class, taken as a…
In this paper we define a new descriptional complexity measure for Deterministic Finite Automata, BC-complexity, as an alternative to the state complexity. We prove that for two DFAs with the same number of states BC-complexity can differ…
We investigate the magic number problem, that is, the question whether there exists a minimal n-state nondeterministic finite automaton (NFA) whose equivalent minimal deterministic finite automaton (DFA) has alpha states, for all n and…
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 establishes a lower bound on the number of states necessary in the worst case to simulate an $n$-state two-way nondeterministic finite automaton (2NFA) by a one-way unambiguous finite automaton (UFA). It is proved that for every…
An index for a finite automaton is a powerful data structure that supports locating paths labeled with a query pattern, thus solving pattern matching on the underlying regular language. In this paper, we solve the long-standing problem of…
A language $L$ over an alphabet $\Sigma$ is prefix-convex if, for any words $x,y,z\in\Sigma^*$, whenever $x$ and $xyz$ are in $L$, then so is $xy$. Prefix-convex languages include right-ideal, prefix-closed, and prefix-free languages. We…
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…
In this paper, we shall present a topological approach for the computation of some supremal sublanguages, often specified by language equations, which arise from the study of the supervisory control theory. The basic idea is to identify the…
In automated complexity analysis, noninterference-based type systems statically guarantee, via soundness, the property that well-typed programs compute functions of a given complexity class, e.g., the class FP of functions computable in…
We survey recent results concerning the complexity of regular languages represented by their minimal deterministic finite automata. In addition to the quotient complexity of the language -- which is the number of its (left) quotients, and…
The height of a piecewise-testable language $L$ is the maximum length of the words needed to define $L$ by excluding and requiring given subwords. The height of $L$ is an important descriptive complexity measure that has not yet been…
We study the problems of finding a shortest synchronizing word and its length for a given prefix code. This is done in two different settings: when the code is defined by an arbitrary decoder recognizing its star and when the code is…
Analogous to regular string and tree languages, regular languages of directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) are defined in the literature. Although called regular, those DAG-languages are more powerful and, consequently, standard problems have a…
Large language models (LLMs) often benefit from verbalized reasoning at inference time, but it remains unclear which aspects of task difficulty these extra reasoning tokens address. To investigate this question, we formalize a framework…
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…
In decentralized supervisory control, several local supervisors cooperate to accomplish a common goal (specification). Controllability and coobservability are the key conditions to achieve a specification in the controlled system. We…