Related papers: State Complexity of Pattern Matching in Regular La…
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…
We study various complexity properties of suffix-free regular languages. The quotient complexity of a regular language $L$ is the number of left quotients of $L$; this is the same as the state complexity of $L$. A regular language $L'$ is a…
Given a pattern string $P$ of length $n$ and a query string $T$ of length $m$, where the characters of $P$ and $T$ are drawn from an alphabet of size $\Delta$, the {\em exact string matching} problem consists of finding all occurrences of…
Hairpin completion is an abstract operation modeling a DNA bio-operation which receives as input a DNA strand $w = x\alpha y \calpha$, and outputs $w' = x \alpha y \bar{\alpha} \bar{x}$, where $\bar{x}$ denotes the Watson-Crick complement…
We consider variations on the following problem: given an NFA M and a pattern p, does there exist an x in L(M) such that p matches x? We consider the restricted problem where M only accepts a finite language. We also consider the variation…
In this paper, we explore worst-case solutions for the problems of single and multiple matching on strings in the word RAM model with word length w. In the first problem, we have to build a data structure based on a pattern p of length m…
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…
Permutation Pattern Matching (or PPM) is a decision problem whose input is a pair of permutations $\pi$ and $\tau$, represented as sequences of integers, and the task is to determine whether $\tau$ contains a subsequence order-isomorphic to…
We study the complexity of the problem of searching for a set of patterns that separate two given sets of strings. This problem has applications in a wide variety of areas, most notably in data mining, computational biology, and in…
A (left) quotient of a language $L$ by a word $w$ is the language $w^{-1}L=\{x\mid wx\in L\}$. The quotient complexity of a regular language $L$ is the number of quotients of $L$; it is equal to the state complexity of $L$, which is the…
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…
A language L is prefix-closed if, whenever a word w is in L, then every prefix of w is also in L. We define suffix-, factor-, and subword-closed languages in the same way, where by subword we mean subsequence. We study the quotient…
We initiate a complexity theoretic study of the language based graph reachability problem (L-REACH) : Fix a language L. Given a graph whose edges are labeled with alphabet symbols of the language L and two special vertices s and t, test if…
Regular expressions constitute a fundamental notion in formal language theory and are frequently used in computer science to define search patterns. A classic algorithm for these problems constructs and simulates a non-deterministic finite…
In this paper we consider the state complexity of an operation on formal languages, root(L). This naturally entails the discussion of the monoid of transformations of a finite set. We obtain good upper and lower bounds on the state…
The subword complexity of a finite word $w$ of length $N$ is a function which associates to each $n\le N$ the number of all distinct subwords of $w$ having the length $n$. We define the \emph{maximal complexity} C(w) as the maximum of the…
We study the state complexity of binary operations on regular languages over different alphabets. It is known that if $L'_m$ and $L_n$ are languages of state complexities $m$ and $n$, respectively, and restricted to the same alphabet, the…
The dictionary matching with gaps problem is to preprocess a dictionary $D$ of $d$ gapped patterns $P_1,\ldots,P_d$ over alphabet $\Sigma$, where each gapped pattern $P_i$ is a sequence of subpatterns separated by bounded sequences of don't…
We generalize the concept of synchronizing words for finite automata, which map all states of the automata to the same state, to deterministic visibly push-down automata. Here, a synchronizing word w does not only map all states to the same…
We study the complexity of the decision problem known as Permutation Pattern Matching, or PPM. The input of PPM consists of a pair of permutations $\tau$ (the `text') and $\pi$ (the `pattern'), and the goal is to decide whether $\tau$…