Related papers: Counting Subwords and Regular Languages
A group is combable if it can be represented by a language of words satisfying a fellow traveller property; an automatic group has a synchronous combing which is a regular language. This paper gives a systematic analysis of the properties…
Let $\mathcal{P}(\Sigma^*)$ be the semiring of languages, and consider its subset $\mathcal{P}(\Sigma)$. In this paper we define the language recognized by a weighted automaton over $\mathcal{P}(\Sigma)$ and a one-letter alphabet.…
Many languages' inflectional morphological systems are replete with irregulars, i.e., words that do not seem to follow standard inflectional rules. In this work, we quantitatively investigate the conditions under which irregulars can…
In a simple pattern matching problem one has a pattern $w$ and a text $t$, which are words over a finite alphabet $\Sigma$. One may ask whether $w$ occurs in $t$, and if so, where? More generally, we may have a set $P$ of patterns and a set…
The average uncertainty associated with words is an information-theoretic concept at the heart of quantitative and computational linguistics. The entropy has been established as a measure of this average uncertainty - also called average…
The set of finite words over a well-quasi-ordered set is itself well-quasi-ordered. This seminal result by Higman is a cornerstone of the theory of well-quasi-orderings and has found numerous applications in computer science. However, this…
A condition characterizing the class of regular languages which have several nonisomorphic minimal reversible automata is presented. The condition concerns the structure of the minimum automaton accepting the language under consideration.…
Given a language L and a nondeterministic finite automaton M, we consider whether we can determine efficiently (in the size of M) if M accepts at least one word in L, or infinitely many words. Given that M accepts at least one word in L, we…
The pioneering research of G. K. Zipf on the relationship between word frequency and other word features led to the formulation of various linguistic laws. The most popular is Zipf's law for word frequencies. Here we focus on two laws that…
A tower between two regular languages is a sequence of strings such that all strings on odd positions belong to one of the languages, all strings on even positions belong to the other language, and each string can be embedded into the next…
The atoms of a regular language are non-empty intersections of complemented and uncomplemented quotients of the language. Tight upper bounds on the number of atoms of a language and on the quotient complexities of atoms are known. We…
In this paper we examine decision problems associated with various classes of convex languages, studied by Ang and Brzozowski (under the name "continuous languages"). We show that we can decide whether a given language L is prefix-,…
A word $w_1w_2\cdots w_n$ is said to be up-down if $w_1 < w_2 >w_3 \cdots$. Carlitz and Scoville found the generating function for the number of up-down words over an alphabet of size $k$. Using properties of the Chebyshev polynomials we…
We study counting-regular languages -- these are languages $L$ for which there is a regular language $L'$ such that the number of strings of length $n$ in $L$ and $L'$ are the same for all $n$. We show that the languages accepted by…
This paper studies balancedness for infinite words and subshifts, both for letters and factors. Balancedness is a measure of disorder that amounts to strong convergence properties for frequencies. It measures the difference between the…
Formal languages are sets of strings of symbols described by a set of rules specific to them. In this note, we discuss a certain class of formal languages, called regular languages, and put forward some elementary results. The properties of…
In this paper, we consider a variant of the classical algorithmic problem of checking whether a given word $v$ is a subsequence of another word $w$. More precisely, we consider the problem of deciding, given a number $p$ (defining a…
We study density of rational languages under shift invariant probability measures on spaces of two-sided infinite words, which generalizes the classical notion of density studied in formal languages and automata theory. The density for a…
A group is combable if it can be represented by a language of words satisfying a fellow traveller property; an automatic group has a synchronous combing which is a regular language. This article surveys results for combable groups, in…
In 2011, Fici and Lipt\'ak introduced prefix normal words. A binary word is prefix normal if it has no factor (substring) that contains more occurrences of the letter 1 than the prefix of the same length. Among the open problems regarding…