Related papers: $O_n$ is an $n$-MCFL
I study the state complexity of binary operations on regular languages over different alphabets. It is well known that if $L'_m$ and $L_n$ are languages restricted to be over the same alphabet, with $m$ and $n$ quotients, respectively, the…
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…
A necklace is an equivalence class of words of length $n$ over an alphabet under the cyclic shift (rotation) operation. As a classical object, there have been many algorithmic results for key operations on necklaces, including counting,…
Characterizing the computational power of neural network architectures in terms of formal language theory remains a crucial line of research, as it describes lower and upper bounds on the reasoning capabilities of modern AI. However, when…
We consider first-order logic over the subword ordering on finite words, where each word is available as a constant. Our first result is that the $\Sigma_1$ theory is undecidable (already over two letters). We investigate the decidability…
Building upon the known generalized-quantifier-based first-order characterization of LOGCFL, we lay the groundwork for a deeper investigation. Specifically, we examine subclasses of LOGCFL arising from varying the arity and nesting of…
In this paper we address the decision problem for a fragment of set theory with restricted quantification which extends the language studied in [4] with pair related quantifiers and constructs, in view of possible applications in the field…
This paper deals with the problem of recognizability of functions l: Sigma* --> M that map words to values in the support set M of a monoid (M,.,1). These functions are called M-languages. M-languages are studied from the aspect of their…
The performance of large language models (LLMs) has recently improved to the point where models can perform well on many language tasks. We show here that--for the first time--the models can also generate valid metalinguistic analyses of…
This article is a sketch of ideas that were once intended to appear in the author's famous series, "The Art of Computer Programming". He generalizes the notion of a context-free language from a set to a multiset of words over an alphabet.…
We give in this paper additional answers to questions of Lescow and Thomas [Logical Specifications of Infinite Computations, In:"A Decade of Concurrency", Springer LNCS 803 (1994), 583-621], proving new topological properties of omega…
Motivated by a recent paper of Gabai on the Whitehead contractible 3-manifold, we investigate contractible manifolds $M^n$ which decompose or split as $M^n = A \cup_C B$ where $A,B,C \approx \mathbb{R}^n$ or $A,B,C \approx \mathbb{B}^n$. Of…
Finding a logical formula that separates positive and negative examples given in the form of labeled data items is fundamental in applications such as concept learning, reverse engineering of database queries, generating referring…
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…
The sequence $(x_n)_{n\in\mathbb N} = (2,5,15,51,187,\dots)$ given by the rule $x_n=(2^n+1)(2^{n-1}+1)/3$ appears in several seemingly unrelated areas of mathematics. For example, $x_n$ is the density of a language of words of length $n$…
Operator precedence languages (OPL) enjoy the local parsability property, which essentially means that a code fragment enclosed within a pair of markers -- playing the role of parentheses -- can be compiled with no knowledge of its external…
For a word $S$, let $f(S)$ be the largest integer $m$ such that there are two disjoints identical (scattered) subwords of length $m$. Let $f(n, \Sigma) = \min \{f(S): S \text{is of length} n, \text{over alphabet} \Sigma \}$. Here, it is…
Due to its expressiveness and unambiguous nature, First-Order Logic (FOL) is a powerful formalism for representing concepts expressed in natural language (NL). This is useful, e.g., for specifying and verifying desired system properties.…
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…
Nen verbal morphology is remarkably complex; a transitive verb can take up to 1,740 unique forms. The combined effect of having a large combinatoric space and a low-resource setting amplifies the need for NLP tools. Nen morphology utilises…