Related papers: Complete Variable-Length Codes: An Excursion into …
For a given language $L$, we study the languages $X$ such that for all distinct words $u, v \in L$, there exists a word $x \in X$ that appears a different number of times as a factor in $u$ and in $v$. In particular, we are interested in…
A language over an alphabet $B = A \cup \overline{A}$ of opening ($A$) and closing ($\overline{A}$) brackets, is balanced if it is a subset of the Dyck language $D_B$ over $B$, and it is well-formed if all words are prefixes of words in…
We study words that barely avoid repetitions, for several senses of "barely". A squarefree (respectively, overlap-free, cubefree) word is irreducible if removing any one of its interior letters creates a square (respectively, overlap,…
Cross-lingual word embeddings encode the meaning of words from different languages into a shared low-dimensional space. An important requirement for many downstream tasks is that word similarity should be independent of language - i.e.,…
Given a word binary relation $\tau$ we define a $\tau$-Gray cycle over a finite language X to be a permutation w [i] 0$\le$i$\le$|X|--1 of X such that each word wi is an image of the previous word wi--1 by $\tau$. In that framework, we…
In this paper, we consider block languages, namely sets of words having the same length, and we propose a new representation for these languages. In particular, given an alphabet of size $k$ and a length $\ell$, a block language can be…
Hairpin completion and its variant called bounded hairpin completion are operations on formal languages, inspired by a hairpin formation in molecular biology. Another variant called hairpin lengthening has been recently introduced and…
A temporal constraint language is a set of relations that are first-order definable over (Q;<). We show that several temporal constraint languages whose constraint satisfaction problem is maximally tractable are also maximally tractable for…
We study the language inclusion problem $L_1 \subseteq L_2$ where $L_1$ is regular or context-free. Our approach relies on abstract interpretation and checks whether an overapproximating abstraction of $L_1$, obtained by overapproximating…
An $s$-subset of codewords of a binary code $X$ is said to be an {\em $(s,\ell)$-bad} in $X$ if the code $X$ contains a subset of other $\ell$ codewords such that the conjunction of the $\ell$ codewords is covered by the disjunctive sum of…
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…
Let A be an alphabet and W be a set of words in the free monoid A*. Let S(W) denote the Rees quotient over the ideal of A* consisting of all words that are not subwords of words in W. We call a set of words W finitely based if the monoid…
Developing suitable formal semantics can be of great help in the understanding, design and implementation of a programming language, and act as a guide for software development tools like analyzers or partial evaluators. In this sense, full…
A language $L$ is said to be dense if every word in the universe is an infix of some word in $L$. This notion has been generalized from the infix operation to arbitrary word operations $\varrho$ in place of the infix operation…
We study the complexity of basic regular operations on languages represented by incomplete deterministic or nondeterministic automata, in which all states are final. Such languages are known to be prefix-closed. We get tight bounds on both…
Indexed languages are a classical notion in formal language theory, which has attracted attention in recent decades due to its role in higher-order model checking: They are precisely the languages accepted by order-2 pushdown automata. The…
In this paper we consider block languages, namely sets of words having the same length, and study the deterministic and nondeterministic state complexity of several operations on these languages. Being a subclass of finite languages, the…
We consider words over a binary alphabet. A word $w$ is overlap-free if it does not have factors (blocks of consecutive letters) of the form $uvuvu$ for nonempty $u$. Let $M(w)$ denote the number of positions that are middle positions of…
Variable-length codes are the bases of the free submonoids of a free monoid. There are some important longstanding open questions about the structure of finite maximal codes, namely the factorization conjecture and the triangle conjecture,…
The complement $\overline{x}$ of a binary word $x$ is obtained by changing each $0$ in $x$ to $1$ and vice versa. We study infinite binary words $\bf w$ that avoid sufficiently large complementary factors; that is, if $x$ is a factor of…