Related papers: Operational State Complexity of Block Languages
We show that for any $i > 0$, it is decidable, given a regular language, whether it is expressible in the $\Sigma_i[<]$ fragment of first-order logic FO[<]. This settles a question open since 1971. Our main technical result relies on the…
We study the complexity of closure operators, with applications to machine learning and decision theory. In machine learning, closure operators emerge naturally in data classification and clustering. In decision theory, they can model…
We examine the class of languages that can be defined entirely in terms of provability in an extension of the sorted type theory (Ty_n) by embedding the logic of phonologies, without introduction of special types for syntactic entities.…
The subword complexity of a finite word $w$ of length $N$ is a function which associates to each $n\le N$ the number of all distinct subwords of $w$ having the length $n$. We define the \emph{maximal complexity} C(w) as the maximum of the…
We develop a simple functional programming language aimed at manipulating infinite, but first-order definable structures, such as the countably infinite clique graph or the set of all intervals with rational endpoints. Internally, such sets…
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…
In order to achieve competitive performance, abstract machines for Prolog and related languages end up being large and intricate, and incorporate sophisticated optimizations, both at the design and at the implementation levels. At the same…
We introduce a method for analyzing the complexity of natural language processing tasks, and for predicting the difficulty new NLP tasks. Our complexity measures are derived from the Kolmogorov complexity of a class of automata --- {\it…
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,…
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…
This paper is a reflexion on the computability of natural language semantics. It does not contain a new model or new results in the formal semantics of natural language: it is rather a computational analysis of the logical models and…
These notes present the essentials of first- and second-order monadic logics on strings with introductory purposes. We discuss Monadic First-Order logic and show that it is strictly less expressive than Finite-State Automata, in that it…
A finitary automaton group is a group generated by an invertible, deterministic finite-state letter-to-letter transducer whose only cycles are self-loops at an identity state. We show that, for this presentation of finite groups, the…
We present methods for calculating a measure of phonotactic complexity---bits per phoneme---that permits a straightforward cross-linguistic comparison. When given a word, represented as a sequence of phonemic segments such as symbols in the…
In this paper we study the state complexity of catenation combined with symmetric difference. First, an upper bound is computed using some combinatoric tools. Then, this bound is shown to be tight by giving a witness for it. Moreover, we…
We present a method of generating first-order logic statements whose complexity can be controlled along multiple dimensions. We use this method to automatically create several datasets consisting of questions asking for the truth or falsity…
We consider the representational state complexity of unranked tree automata. The bottom-up computation of an unranked tree automaton may be either deterministic or nondeterministic, and further variants arise depending on whether the…
A class of valued constraint satisfaction problems (VCSPs) is characterised by a valued constraint language, a fixed set of cost functions on a finite domain. An instance of the problem is specified by a sum of cost functions from the…
We examine questions involving nondeterministic finite automata where all states are final, initial, or both initial and final. First, we prove hardness results for the nonuniversality and inequivalence problems for these NFAs. Next, we…
Linguistic variables represent crisp information in a form and precision appropriate for the problem. For example, to answer the question "How are you?" one may say "I am fine." the linguistic variables like "fine", so common in everyday…