Related papers: Testing Simon's congruence
Satisfiability of word equations is an important problem in the intersection of formal languages and algebra: Given two sequences consisting of letters and variables we are to decide whether there is a substitution for the variables that…
Vector space models of words have long been claimed to capture linguistic regularities as simple vector translations, but problems have been raised with this claim. We decompose and empirically analyze the classic arithmetic word analogy…
A decision problem is called parameterized if its input is a pair of strings. One of these strings is referred to as a parameter. The problem: given a propositional logic program P and a non-negative integer k, decide whether P has a stable…
An absent word of a word y of length n is a word that does not occur in y. It is a minimal absent word if all its proper factors occur in y. Minimal absent words have been computed in genomes of organisms from all domains of life; their…
We investigate the question whether Subset Sum can be solved by a polynomial-time algorithm with access to a certificate of length poly(k) where k is the maximal number of bits in an input number. In other words, can it be solved using only…
We study succinctness as a measure of the expressive power of transformers. Succinctness -- how compactly a formalism can describe a language relative to other formalisms -- is a classical notion in logic and automata theory. We prove that…
It has been argued that analogy is the core of cognition. In AI research, algorithms for analogy are often limited by the need for hand-coded high-level representations as input. An alternative approach is to use high-level perception, in…
Ensuring that collections of natural-language facts are globally consistent is essential for tasks such as fact-checking, summarization, and knowledge base construction. While Large Language Models (LLMs) can assess the consistency of small…
In this paper we consider the problem of deciding membership in Dyck languages, a fundamental family of context-free languages, comprised of well-balanced strings of parentheses. In this problem we are given a string of length $n$ in the…
Given a finite alphabet $\Sigma$ and a right-infinite word $\bf w$ over $\Sigma$, we define the Lie complexity function $L_{\bf w}:\mathbb{N}\to \mathbb{N}$, whose value at $n$ is the number of conjugacy classes (under cyclic shift) of…
Much like sentences are composed of words, words themselves are composed of smaller units. For example, the English word questionably can be analyzed as question+able+ly. However, this structural decomposition of the word does not directly…
We consider the problem of computing a shortest solid cover of an indeterminate string. An indeterminate string may contain non-solid symbols, each of which specifies a subset of the alphabet that could be present at the corresponding…
The predominant challenge in weakly supervised semantic parsing is that of spurious programs that evaluate to correct answers for the wrong reasons. Prior work uses elaborate search strategies to mitigate the prevalence of spurious…
Let $x$ and $y$ be words. We consider the languages whose words $z$ are those for which the numbers of occurrences of $x$ and $y$, as subwords of $z$, are the same (resp., the number of $x$'s is less than the number of $y$'s, resp., is less…
We show that the shuffle $L \unicode{x29E2} F$ of a piecewise-testable language $L$ and a finite language $F$ is piecewise-testable. The proof relies on a classic but little-used automata-theoretic characterization of piecewise-testable…
The quotient complexity of a regular language L is the number of left quotients of L, which is the same as the state complexity of L. Suppose that L and L' are binary regular languages with quotient complexities m and n, and that the…
If no optimal propositional proof system exists, we (and independently Pudl\'ak) prove that ruling out length $t$ proofs of any unprovable sentence is hard. This mapping from unprovable to hard-to-prove sentences powerfully translates facts…
The verification of reductions, representative subsets of interleavings, simplifies correctness proofs of parameterized concurrent programs. We introduce an expressive class of syntactic reductions, which we call natural reductions. Natural…
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…
Language models provide a key framework for studying linguistic theories based on prediction, but phonological analysis using large language models (LLMs) is difficult; there are few phonological benchmarks beyond English and the standard…