Related papers: Directed Regular and Context-Free Languages
We study the question of whether a given regular language of finite trees can be defined in first-order logic. We develop an algebraic approach to address this question and we use it to derive several necessary and sufficient conditions for…
Patterns are words with terminals and variables. The language of a pattern is the set of words obtained by uniformly substituting all variables with words that contain only terminals. In their original definition, patterns only allow for…
Piecewise testable languages form the first level of the Straubing-Th\'erien hierarchy. The membership problem for this level is decidable and testing if the language of a DFA is piecewise testable is NL-complete. The question has not yet…
We consider extensions of monadic second order logic over $\omega$-words, which are obtained by adding one language that is not $\omega$-regular. We show that if the added language $L$ has a neutral letter, then the resulting logic is…
The world's languages exhibit certain so-called typological or implicational universals; for example, Subject-Object-Verb (SOV) languages typically use postpositions. Explaining the source of such biases is a key goal of linguistics. We…
Regular word grammars are restricted context-free grammars that define all the recognizable languages of words. This paper generalizes regular grammars from words to certain classes of graphs, by defining regular grammars for unordered…
We explore language semantics for automata combining probabilistic and nondeterministic behavior. We first show that there are precisely two natural semantics for probabilistic automata with nondeterminism. For both choices, we show that…
Natural language reasoning plays an increasingly important role in improving language models' ability to solve complex language understanding tasks. An interesting use case for reasoning is the resolution of context-dependent ambiguity. But…
A zero-one language L is a regular language whose asymptotic probability converges to either zero or one. In this case, we say that L obeys the zero-one law. We prove that a regular language obeys the zero-one law if and only if its…
Large Language Models (LLMs) are intended to reflect human linguistic competencies. But humans have access to a broad and embodied context, which is key in detecting and resolving linguistic ambiguities, even in isolated text spans. A…
Iterated hairpin completion is an operation on formal languages that is inspired by the hairpin formation in DNA biochemistry. Iterated hairpin completion of a word (or more precisely a singleton language) is always a context-sensitive…
Splicing as a binary word/language operation is inspired by the DNA recombination under the action of restriction enzymes and ligases, and was first introduced by Tom Head in 1987. Shortly thereafter, it was proven that the languages…
We consider languages defined by signed grammars which are similar to context-free grammars except productions with signs associated to them are allowed. As a consequence, the words generated also have signs. We use the structure of the…
In this paper we introduce and study new notions of uniform recurrence in multidimensional words. A $d$-dimensional word is called \emph{uniformly recurrent} if for all $(s_1,\ldots,s_d)\in\mathbb{N}^d$ there exists $n\in\mathbb{N}$ such…
In this paper, we present a proof of the NP-completeness of computing the smallest Deterministic Finite Automaton (DFA) that distinguishes two given regular languages as DFAs. A distinguishing DFA is an automaton that recognizes a language…
A temporal (constraint) language is a relational structure with a first-order definition in the rational numbers with the order. We study here the complexity of the Quantified Constraint Satisfaction Problem (QCSP) for temporal constraint…
We define a new subclass of nondeterministic finite automata for prefix-closed languages called Flanked Finite Automata (FFA). We show that this class enjoys good complexity properties while preserving the succinctness of nondeterministic…
This paper considers the word problem for free inverse monoids of finite rank from a language theory perspective. It is shown that no free inverse monoid has context-free word problem; that the word problem of the free inverse monoid of…
A regular tree language L is locally testable if membership of a tree in L depends only on the presence or absence of some fix set of neighborhoods in the tree. In this paper we show that it is decidable whether a regular tree language is…
State-of-the-art deep-learning-based approaches to Natural Language Processing (NLP) are credited with various capabilities that involve reasoning with natural language texts. In this paper we carry out a large-scale empirical study…