Related papers: A substitution lemma for multiple context-free lan…
These lecture notes are intended as a supplement to Moore and Mertens' The Nature of Computation or as a standalone resource, and are available to anyone who wants to use them. Comments are welcome, and please let me know if you use these…
The hyperedge replacement grammar (HRG) formalism is a natural and well-known generalization of context-free grammars. HRGs inherit a number of properties of context-free grammars, e.g. the pumping lemma. This lemma turns out to be a strong…
We show that many classical decision problems about 1-counter omega-languages, context free omega-languages, or infinitary rational relations, are $\Pi_2^1$-complete, hence located at the second level of the analytical hierarchy, and…
We investigate the proof theory of regular expressions with fixed points, construed as a notation for (omega-)context-free grammars. Starting with a hypersequential system for regular expressions due to Das and Pous, we define its extension…
Modern language models are capable of contextualizing words based on their surrounding context. However, this capability is often compromised due to semantic change that leads to words being used in new, unexpected contexts not encountered…
The paper demonstrates the non-closure of the family of unambiguous linear languages (that is, those defined by unambiguous linear context-free grammars) under complementation. To be precise, a particular unambiguous linear grammar is…
A test set for a formal language (set of strings) L is a subset T of L such that for any two string homomorphisms f and g defined on L, if the restrictions of f and g on T are identical functions, then f and g are identical on the entire L.…
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…
Ambiguous words or underspecified references require interlocutors to resolve them, often by relying on shared context and commonsense knowledge. Therefore, we systematically investigate whether Large Language Models (LLMs) can leverage…
In 2018, it was shown that all finitely generated virtually Abelian groups have multiple context-free word problems, and it is still an open problem as to where to precisely place the word problems of hyperbolic groups in the formal…
Over-prompting, a phenomenon where excessive examples in prompts lead to diminished performance in Large Language Models (LLMs), challenges the conventional wisdom about in-context few-shot learning. To investigate this few-shot dilemma, we…
Phrase-structure grammars are effective models for important syntactic and semantic aspects of natural languages, but can be computationally too demanding for use as language models in real-time speech recognition. Therefore, finite-state…
We prove that the finite condensation rank (FC-rank) of the lexicographic ordering of a context-free language is strictly less than $\omega^\omega$.
Low-resource languages pose a challenge for machine translation with large language models (LLMs), which require large amounts of training data. One potential way to circumvent this data dependence is to rely on LLMs' ability to use…
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-$\operatorname{AFL}$,…
Context-free languages can be characterized in several ways. This article studies projective linearisations of languages of simple dependency trees, i.e., dependency trees in which a node can govern at most one node with a given syntactic…
In-context learning is a popular inference strategy where large language models solve a task using only a few labeled demonstrations without needing any parameter updates. Although there have been extensive studies on English in-context…
We prove that, for a finitely generated group hyperbolic relative to virtually abelian subgroups, the generalised word problem for a parabolic subgroup is the language of a real-time Turing machine. Then, for a hyperbolic group, we show…
We prove that a group has word problem that is a growing context-sensitive language precisely if its word problem can be solved using a non-deterministic Cannon's algorithm (the deterministic algorithms being defined by Goodman and…
Several methods are discussed that construct a finite automaton given a context-free grammar, including both methods that lead to subsets and those that lead to supersets of the original context-free language. Some of these methods of…