Related papers: Rational index of bounded-oscillation languages
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…
For a complexity function $C$, the lower and upper $C$-complexity rates of an infinite word $\mathbf{x}$ are \[ \underline{C}(\mathbf x)=\liminf_{n\to\infty} \frac{C(\mathbf{x}\upharpoonright n)}n,\quad \overline{C}(\mathbf…
This paper presents a restricted form of linear indexed grammars, called even linear indexed grammars, which yield the even linear indexed languages. These languages properly contain the context-free languages and are contained in the set…
Indexed languages are a classical notion in formal language theory. As the language equivalent of second-order pushdown automata, they have received considerable attention in higher-order model checking. Unfortunately, counting properties…
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…
To Rogers (1994) we owe the insight that monadic second order predicate logic with multiple successors (MSO) is well suited in many respects as a realistic formal base for syntactic theorizing. However, the agreeable formal properties of…
We prove lower bounds on the length of regular expressions for finite languages by methods from arithmetic circuit complexity. First, we show a reduction: the length of a regular expression for a language $L\subseteq \{0,1\}^n$ is bounded…
The downward closure of a word language is the set of all (not necessarily contiguous) subwords of its members. It is well-known that the downward closure of any language is regular. While the downward closure appears to be a powerful…
Let $A_N$ denote nondeterministic automatic complexity and \[ L_{k,c}=\{x\in [k]^* : A_N(x)> |x|/c\}. \] In particular, $L_{k,2}$ is the language of all $k$-ary words for which $A_N$ is maximal, while $L_{k,3}$ gives a rough dividing line…
This work is a survey of the main results reported for the degree of extension of two models defining non-regular languages, namely the context-free grammar and the extended automaton over groups. More precisely, we recall the main results…
Operator precedence grammars define a classical Boolean and deterministic context-free family (called Floyd languages or FLs). FLs have been shown to strictly include the well-known visibly pushdown languages, and enjoy the same nice…
Nonterminal complexity of a context-free language is the smallest possible number of nonterminals in its generating grammar. While in general case nonterminal complexity computation problem is unsolvable, it can be computed for different…
We present a method for approximating context-free languages with one-counter automata. This approximation allows the reconstruction of parse trees of the original grammar. We identify a decidable superset of regular languages whose…
In this paper we consider the problem of context-free grammars comparison from the analysis point of view. We show that the problem can be reduced to numerical solution of systems of nonlinear matrix equations. The approach presented here…
Motivated by recent connections to factorised databases, we analyse the efficiency of representations by context free grammars (CFGs). Concretely, we prove a recent conjecture by Kimelfeld, Martens, and Niewerth (ICDT 2025), that for finite…
A filtration of a formal language L by a sequence s maps L to the set of words formed by taking the letters of words of L indexed only by s. We consider the languages resulting from filtering by all arithmetic progressions. If L is regular,…
A right ideal is a language L over an alphabet A that satisfies L = LA*. We show that there exists a stream (sequence) (R_n : n \ge 3) of regular right ideal languages, where R_n has n left quotients and is most complex under the following…
We study descriptive complexity properties of the class of regular bifix-free languages, which is the intersection of prefix-free and suffix-free regular languages. We show that there exist a single ternary universal (stream of) bifix-free…
Often, when analyzing the behaviour of systems modelled as context-free languages, we wish to know if two languages overlap. To this end, we present an effective semi-decision procedure for regular separability of context-free languages,…
The states of a deterministic finite automaton A can be identified with collections of words in Pf(L(A)) -- the set of prefixes of words belonging to the regular language accepted by A. But words can be ordered and among the many possible…