Related papers: Complete Variable-Length Codes: An Excursion into …
A code is called solid if, roughly speaking, any correctly-transmitted codeword in an arbitrarily corrupted string of codewords can still be decoded correctly and unambiguously. So-called variable-length solid codes, in which codewords may…
Let $L_{K}(A)$ be the free Lie algebra on a finite alphabet $A$ over a commutative ring $K$ with unity. For a word $u$ in the free monoid $A^{*}$ let $\tilde{u}$ denote its reversal. Two words in $A^{*}$ are called twin (resp. anti-twin) if…
A word is square-free if it does not contain nonempty factors of the form $XX$. In 1906 Thue proved that there exist arbitrarily long square-free words over a $3$-letter alphabet. It was proved recently [7] that among these words there are…
Let A be a finite alphabet and let L contained in (A*)^n be an n-variable language over A. We say that L is regular if it is the language accepted by a synchronous n-tape finite state automaton, it is quasi-regular if it is accepted by an…
We show the surprising result that the cutpoint isolation problem is decidable for Probabilistic Finite Automata (PFA) where input words are taken from a letter-bounded context-free language. A context-free language $\mathcal{L}$ is…
Group languages are regular languages recognized by finite groups, or equivalently by finite automata in which each letter induces a permutation on the set of states. We investigate the separation problem for this class of languages: given…
We investigate the star-free closure, which associates to a class of languages its closure under Boolean operations and marked concatenation. We prove that the star-free closure of any finite class and of any class of groups languages with…
Context free languages allow one to express data with hierarchical structure, at the cost of losing some of the useful properties of languages recognized by finite automata on words. However, it is possible to restore some of these…
Matching logic is a general formal framework for reasoning about a wide range of theories, with particular emphasis on programming language semantics. Notably, the intermediate language of the K semantics framework is an extension of…
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…
We know extensions of first order logic by quantifiers of the kind "there are uncountable many ...", "most ..." with new axioms and appropriate semantics. Related are operations such as "set of x, such that ...", Hilbert's…
Free words are elements of a free monoid, generated over an alphabet via the binary operation of concatenation. Casually speaking, a free word is a finite string of letters. Henceforth, we simply refer to them as words. Motivated by recent…
A set X of partial words over a finite alphabet A is called unavoidable if every two-sided infinite word over A has a factor compatible with an element of X. Unlike the case of a set of words without holes, the problem of deciding whether…
Recently data trees and data words have received considerable amount of attention in connection with XML reasoning and system verification. These are trees or words that, in addition to labels from a finite alphabet, carry data values from…
We investigate the order of the variance of the optimal alignments score of two independent iid binary random words having the same length. The letters are equiprobable, but the scoring function is such that one letter has a larger score…
A family $\mathcal L$ of subsets of a set $X$ is called linked if $A\cap B\ne\emptyset$ for any $A,B\in\mathcal L$. A linked family $\mathcal M$ of subsets of $X$ is maximal linked if $\mathcal M$ coincides with each linked family $\mathcal…
For a random variable $X$, we are interested in the blind extraction of its finest mutual independence pattern $\mu ( X )$. We introduce a specific kind of independence that we call dichotomic. If $\Delta ( X )$ stands for the set of all…
In this note we provide a (decidable) graph-structural characterisation of the infiniteness of $L(w_1, ..., w_k)$, where $L(w_1, ..., w_k) = \{w \in A^* | |w|_{w_1} = \cdots = |w|_{w_k}\}$ is the set of all words that contain the same…
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…
A deterministic finite automaton in which every non-empty set of states occurs as the image of the whole state set under the action of a suitable input word is called completely reachable. It was conjectured that in each completely…