Related papers: On all things star-free

We introduce an operator on classes of regular languages, the star-free closure. Our motivation is to generalize standard results of automata theory within a unified framework. Given an arbitrary input class $C$, the star-free closure…

We study the state complexity of boolean operations and product (concatenation, catenation) combined with star. We derive tight upper bounds for the symmetric differences and differences of two languages, one or both of which are starred,…

In this article we show that every group with a finite presentation satisfying one or both of the small cancellation conditions $C'(1/6)$ and $C'(1/4)-T(4)$ has the property that the set of all geodesics (over the same generating set) is a…

We study a standard operator on classes of languages: unambiguous polynomial closure. We prove that for every class C of regular languages satisfying mild properties, the membership problem for its unambiguous polynomial closure UPol(C)…

We formalized general (i.e., type-0) grammars using the Lean 3 proof assistant. We defined basic notions of rewrite rules and of words derived by a grammar, and used grammars to show closure of the class of type-0 languages under four…

We consider a set of natural operations on languages, and prove that the orbit of any language L under the monoid generated by this set is finite and bounded, independently of L. This generalizes previous results about complement, Kleene…

We prove the decidability for a class of languages which extend BST and NP-completeness for a subclass of them. The languages BST extended with unordered cartesian product, BST extended with ordered cartesian product and BST extended with…

A language L is closed if L = L*. We consider an operation on closed languages, L-*, that is an inverse to Kleene closure. It is known that if L is closed and regular, then L-* is also regular. We show that the analogous result fails to…

Given a regular language $L$, we study the language of words $\mathsf{D}(L)$, that distinguish between pairs of different left-quotients of $L$. We characterize this distinguishability operation, show that its iteration has always a fixed…

Let $\cal R$ be an ordered vector space over an ordered division ring. We prove that every definable set $X$ is a finite union of relatively open definable subsets which are definably simply-connected, settling a conjecture from [5]. The…

A celebrated result of Sch\"utzenberger says that a language is star-free if and only if it is is recognized by a finite aperiodic monoid. We give a new proof for this theorem using local divisors.

We show that for any $i > 0$, it is decidable, given a regular language, whether it is expressible in the $\Sigma_i[<]$ fragment of first-order logic FO[<]. This settles a question open since 1971. Our main technical result relies on the…

Over finite words, languages of dot-depth one are expressively complete for alternation-free first-order logic. This fragment is also known as the Boolean closure of existential first-order logic. Here, the atomic formulas comprise order,…

We show that the decidability of the first-order theory of the language that combines Boolean algebras of sets of uninterpreted elements with Presburger arithmetic operations. We thereby disprove a recent conjecture that this theory is…

A regular language $L$ is union-free if it can be represented by a regular expression without the union operation. A union-free language is deterministic if it can be accepted by a deterministic one-cycle-free-path finite automaton; this is…

A regular language has the zero-one law if its asymptotic density converges to either zero or one. We prove that the class of all zero-one languages is closed under Boolean operations and quotients. Moreover, we prove that a regular…

A class of languages C is perfect if it is closed under Boolean operations and the emptiness problem is decidable. Perfect language classes are the basis for the automata-theoretic approach to model checking: a system is correct if the…

We define a new class of languages of $\omega$-words, strictly extending $\omega$-regular languages. One way to present this new class is by a type of regular expressions. The new expressions are an extension of $\omega$-regular expressions…

The separability problem for word languages of a class $\mathcal{C}$ by languages of a class $\mathcal{S}$ asks, for two given languages $I$ and $E$ from $\mathcal{C}$, whether there exists a language $S$ from $\mathcal{S}$ that includes…

Floyd's Operator Precedence (OP) languages are a deterministic context-free family having many desirable properties. They are locally and parallely parsable, and languages having a compatible structure are closed under Boolean operations,…