Related papers: Decomposing Finite Languages
The dot-depth hierarchy of Brzozowski and Cohen classifies the star-free languages of finite words. By a theorem of McNaughton and Papert, these are also the first-order definable languages. The dot-depth rose to prominence following the…
Recently, a new paradigm was introduced in automata theory. The main idea is to classify regular languages according to their propensity to be sorted, establishing a deep connection between automata theory and data compression [J. ACM…
We study the language-theoretic properties of the word problem, in the sense of Duncan & Gilman, of weakly compressible monoids, as defined by Adian & Oganesian. We show that if $\mathcal{C}$ is a reversal-closed super-$\operatorname{AFL}$,…
We consider the class ${\cal P}_1$ of all infinite words $x\in A^\omega$ over a finite alphabet $A$ admitting a prefixal factorization, i.e., a factorization $x= U_0 U_1U_2 \cdots $ where each $U_i$ is a non-empty prefix of $x.$ With each…
The state complexity of basic operations on finite languages (considering complete DFAs) has been in studied the literature. In this paper we study the incomplete (deterministic) state and transition complexity on finite languages of…
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…
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…
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 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…
The problem DFA-Intersection-Nonemptiness asks if a given number of deterministic automata accept a common word. In general, this problem is PSPACE-complete. Here, we investigate this problem for the subclasses of commutative automata and…
We continue our study of open and closed languages. We investigate how the properties of being open and closed are preserved under concatenation. We investigate analogues, in formal languages, of the separation axioms in topological spaces;…
We investigate the computational power of periodically iterated morphisms, also known as D0L systems with periodic control, PD0L systems for short. These systems give rise to a class of one-sided infinite sequences, called PD0L words. We…
Indexing strings via prefix (or suffix) sorting is, arguably, one of the most successful algorithmic techniques developed in the last decades. Can indexing be extended to languages? The main contribution of this paper is to initiate the…
The class of problems complete for NP via first-order reductions is known to be characterized by existential second-order sentences of a fixed form. All such sentences are built around the so-called generalized IS-form of the sentence that…
Affine finite automata (AfA) can be more succinct than probabilistic and quantum finite automata when recognizing some regular languages with bounded-error. In this paper, we improve previously known constructions given for the succinctness…
We consider several novel aspects of unique factorization in formal languages. We reprove the familiar fact that the set uf(L) of words having unique factorization into elements of L is regular if L is regular, and from this deduce an…
It is an open problem to characterize the class of languages recognized by quantum finite automata (QFA). We examine some necessary and some sufficient conditions for a (regular) language to be recognizable by a QFA. For a subclass of…
For formulas F of propositional calculus I introduce a "metavariable" MF and show how it can be used to define an algorithm for testing satisfiability. MF is a formula which is true/false under all possible truth assignments iff F is…
Given a regular language $L$, we study the language of words $\mathsf{D}(L)$, that distinguish between pairs of different left-quotients of $L$. We characterize this distinguishability operation, show that its iteration has always a fixed…
We study FO+, a fragment of first-order logic on finite words, where monadic predicates can only appear positively. We show that there is a FO-definable language that is monotone in monadic predicates but not definable in FO+. This provides…