Related papers: Regular expression length via arithmetic formula c…
In this paper we consider the following problems: how many different subsets of Sigma^n can occur as set of all length-n factors of a finite word? If a subset is representable, how long a word do we need to represent it? How many such…
We study regular expressions that use variables, or parameters, which are interpreted as alphabet letters. We consider two classes of languages denoted by such expressions: under the possibility semantics, a word belongs to the language if…
We investigate the expressive power of regular expressions for languages of countable words and establish their expressive equivalence with logical and algebraic characterizations. Our goal is to extend the classical theory of regular…
The downward and upward closures of a regular language $L$ are obtained by collecting all the subwords and superwords of its elements, respectively. The downward and upward interiors of $L$ are obtained dually by collecting words having all…
We study the asymptotics and fine-scale behavior of quantitative combinatorial measures of infinite words and related dynamical and algebraic structures. We construct infinite recurrent words $w$ whose complexity functions $p_w(n)$ are…
The atoms of a regular language are non-empty intersections of complemented and uncomplemented quotients of the language. Tight upper bounds on the number of atoms of a language and on the quotient complexities of atoms are known. We…
Nielsen transformations form the basis of a simple and widely used procedure for solving word equations. We make progress on the problem of determining when this procedure terminates in the presence of length constraints. To do this, we…
This article presents a combinatorial result on indexed languages which was inspired by an attempt to understand the structure of groups with indexed language word problem. We show that a sufficiently long word in an indexed language can be…
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…
Minimal codewords have applications in decoding linear codes and in cryptography. We study the maximum number of minimal codewords in binary linear codes of a given length and dimension. Improved lower and upper bounds on the maximum number…
Regular expressions with backreferences (regex, for short), as supported by most modern libraries for regular expression matching, have an NP-complete matching problem. We define a complexity parameter of regex, called active variable…
A generalization of numeration system in which the set N of the natural numbers is recognizable by finite automata can be obtained by describing a lexicographically ordered infinite regular language. Here we show that if P belonging to Q[x]…
The mapping of lexical meanings to wordforms is a major feature of natural languages. While usage pressures might assign short words to frequent meanings (Zipf's law of abbreviation), the need for a productive and open-ended vocabulary,…
Given a partially-ordered finite alphabet $\Sigma$ and a language $L\subseteq \Sigma^*$, how large can an antichain in $L$ be (where $L$ is given the lexicographic ordering)? More precisely, since $L$ will in general be infinite, we should…
The avoidability, or unavoidability of patterns in words over finite alphabets has been studied extensively. A word (pattern) over a finite set is said to be unavoidable if, for all but finitely many words, there exists a morphism mapping…
The clone of term operations of an algebraic structure consists of all operations that can be expressed by a term in the language of the structure. We consider bounds for the length and the height of the terms expressing these functions,…
We study the task, for a given language $L$, of enumerating the (generally infinite) sequence of its words, without repetitions, while bounding the delay between two consecutive words. To allow for delay bounds that do not depend on the…
Using appropriate notation systems for proofs, cut-reduction can often be rendered feasible on these notations, and explicit bounds can be given. Developing a suitable notation system for Bounded Arithmetic, and applying these bounds, all…
The motivation for this paper is to study the complexity of constant-width arithmetic circuits. Our main results are the following. 1. For every k > 1, we provide an explicit polynomial that can be computed by a linear-sized monotone…
We introduce the finite-horizon first-order rank profile of a language $L \subseteq \Sigma^*$: the least quantifier rank needed by an $\mathrm{FO}[<]$ sentence to classify membership in $L$ correctly on all words of length at most $n$. The…