Related papers: Closing star-free closure
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…
We study the state complexity of boolean operations and product (concatenation, catenation) combined with star. We derive tight upper bounds for the symmetric differences and differences of two languages, one or both of which are starred,…
We define a new class of languages of $\omega$-words, strictly extending $\omega$-regular languages. One way to present this new class is by a type of regular expressions. The new expressions are an extension of $\omega$-regular expressions…
Over finite words, languages of dot-depth one are expressively complete for alternation-free first-order logic. This fragment is also known as the Boolean closure of existential first-order logic. Here, the atomic formulas comprise order,…
Floyd's Operator Precedence (OP) languages are a deterministic context-free family having many desirable properties. They are locally and parallely parsable, and languages having a compatible structure are closed under Boolean operations,…
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 introduce a flexible class of well-quasi-orderings (WQOs) on words that generalizes the ordering of (not necessarily contiguous) subwords. Each such WQO induces a class of piecewise testable languages (PTLs) as Boolean combinations of…
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 the complexity of basic regular operations on languages represented by incomplete deterministic or nondeterministic automata, in which all states are final. Such languages are known to be prefix-closed. We get tight bounds on both…
Context-free language theory is a subject of high importance in computer language processing technology as well as in formal language theory. This paper presents a formalization, using the Coq proof assistant, of fundamental results related…
This paper proposes an extension to classical regular expressions by the addition of two operators allowing the inclusion of boolean formulae from the zeroth order logic. These expressions are called constrained expressions. The associated…
A celebrated result of Sch\"utzenberger says that a language is star-free if and only if it is is recognized by a finite aperiodic monoid. We give a new proof for this theorem using local divisors.
We consider first-order logic with monoidal quantifiers over words. We show that all languages with a neutral letter, definable using the addition numerical predicate are also definable with the order predicate as the only numerical…
We describe two formalisms for defining graph languages, and prove that they are equivalent: 1. Separator logic. This is first-order logic on graphs which is allowed to use the edge relation, and for every $n \in \{0,1,\ldots \}$ a relation…
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…
We define the notion of rational closure in the context of Description Logics extended with a tipicality operator. We start from ALC+T, an extension of ALC with a typicality operator T: intuitively allowing to express concepts of the form…
We investigate the nondeterministic state complexity of basic operations for suffix-free regular languages. The nondeterministic state complexity of an operation is the number of states that are necessary and sufficient in the worst-case…
Indexed languages are a classical notion in formal language theory, which has attracted attention in recent decades due to its role in higher-order model checking: They are precisely the languages accepted by order-2 pushdown automata. The…
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 class of Unambiguous Star-Free Regular Languages (UL) was defined by Schutzenberger as the class of languages defined by Unambiguous Polynomials. UL has been variously characterized (over finite words) by logics such as TL[X_a,Y_a],…