Related papers: Widths of regular and context-free languages
We prove lower bounds on the length of regular expressions for finite languages by methods from arithmetic circuit complexity. First, we show a reduction: the length of a regular expression for a language $L\subseteq \{0,1\}^n$ is bounded…
Given a regular language L over an ordered alphabet $\Sigma$, the set of lexicographically smallest (resp., largest) words of each length is itself regular. Moreover, there exists an unambiguous finite-state transducer that, on a given word…
A recent study on structural properties of regular and context-free languages has greatly promoted our basic understandings of the complex behaviors of those languages. We continue the study to examine how regular languages behave when they…
The computational complexity of the isomorphism problem for regular trees, regular linear orders, and regular words is analyzed. A tree is regular if it is isomorphic to the prefix order on a regular language. In case regular languages are…
We consider two natural problems about nondeterministic finite automata. First, given such an automaton M of n states, and a length l, does M accept a word of length l? We show that the classic problem of triangle-free graph recognition…
A set $X\subseteq\mathbb N$ is S-recognizable for an abstract numeration system S if the set $\rep_S(X)$ of its representations is accepted by a finite automaton. We show that the growth function of an S-recognizable set is always either…
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…
Co-lex partial orders were recently introduced in (Cotumaccio et al., SODA 2021 and JACM 2023) as a powerful tool to index finite state automata, with applications to regular expression matching. They generalize Wheeler orders (Gagie et…
The ambiguity of a nondeterministic finite automaton (NFA) N for input size n is the maximal number of accepting computations of N for an input of size n. For all k, r 2 N we construct languages Lr,k which can be recognized by NFA's with…
In a recent paper we analyzed the space complexity of streaming algorithms whose goal is to decide membership of a sliding window to a fixed language. For the class of regular languages we proved a space trichotomy theorem: for every…
We study the matching problem of regular tree languages, that is, "$\exists \sigma:\sigma(L)\subseteq R$?" where $L,R$ are regular tree languages over the union of finite ranked alphabets $\Sigma$ and $\mathcal{X}$ where $\mathcal{X}$ is an…
A morphic word is obtained by iterating a morphism to generate an infinite word, and then applying a coding. We characterize morphic words with polynomial growth in terms of a new type of infinite word called a $\textit{zigzag word}$. A…
We investigate a multivariate growth series $\Gamma_L({\bf z}), {\bf z} \in \mathbb{C}^d$ associated with a regular language $L$ over an alphabet of cardinality $d.$ Our focus is on languages coming from subgroups of the free group and from…
Consider the set of those binary words with no non-empty factors of the form $xxx^R$. Du, Mousavi, Schaeffer, and Shallit asked whether this set of words grows polynomially or exponentially with length. In this paper, we demonstrate the…
Low-latency sliding window algorithms for regular and context-free languages are studied, where latency refers to the worst-case time spent for a single window update or query. For every regular language $L$ it is shown that there exists a…
We use large language models (LLMs) to uncover long-ranged structure in English texts from a variety of sources. The conditional entropy or code length in many cases continues to decrease with context length at least to $N\sim 10^4$…
In this paper, we study the growth of transcendental entire solutions of linear difference equations \begin{equation} P_m(z)\Delta^mf(z)+\cdots+P_1(z)\Delta f(z)+P_0(z)f(z)=0,\tag{+} \end{equation} where $P_j(z)$ are polynomials for…
We examine the evolution of the vocabulary of a group of individuals (linguistic agents) on a scale-free network, using Monte Carlo simulations and assumptions from evolutionary game theory. It is known that when the agents are arranged in…
In the present work, we tackle the regular language indexing problem by first studying the hierarchy of $p$-sortable languages: regular languages accepted by automata of width $p$. We show that the hierarchy is strict and does not collapse,…
We prove two results about width of words in $SL_n(\mathbb{Z})$. The first is that, for every $n \geq 3$, there is a constant $C(n)$ such that the width of any word in $SL_n(\mathbb{Z})$ is less than $C(n)$. The second result is that, for…