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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…

Formal Languages and Automata Theory · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Richard Mandel , Corto Mascle , Georg Zetzsche

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-09 Jackson Petty , Jaulie Goe , Tal Linzen

We present a new approach to formal language theory using Kolmogorov complexity. The main results presented here are an alternative for pumping lemma(s), a new characterization for regular languages, and a new method to separate…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2007-05-23 Ming Li , Paul Vitanyi

This paper solves an open problem concerning the generative power of nonerasing context-free rewriting systems using a simple mechanism for checking for context dependencies, in the literature known as semi-conditional grammars of degree…

Formal Languages and Automata Theory · Computer Science 2010-04-22 Tomas Masopust

Context-free grammars are not able to model cross-serial dependencies in natural languages. To overcome this issue, Seki et al. introduced a generalization called $m$-multiple context-free grammars ($m$-MCFGs), which deal with $m$-tuples of…

Formal Languages and Automata Theory · Computer Science 2021-03-17 Florian Lehner , Christian Lindorfer

This paper presents a complete axiomatization of Monadic Second-Order Logic (MSO) over infinite trees. MSO on infinite trees is a rich system, and its decidability ("Rabin's Tree Theorem") is one of the most powerful known results…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2023-06-22 Anupam Das , Colin Riba

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…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2023-01-26 Dino Mandrioli , Davide Martinenghi , Angelo Morzenti , Matteo Pradella , Matteo Rossi

Second-order transitive-closure logic, SO(TC), is an expressive declarative language that captures the complexity class PSPACE. Already its monadic fragment, MSO(TC), allows the expression of various NP-hard and even PSPACE-hard problems in…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2018-04-18 Flavio Ferrarotti , Jan Van den Bussche , Jonni Virtema

This article is a sketch of ideas that were once intended to appear in the author's famous series, "The Art of Computer Programming". He generalizes the notion of a context-free language from a set to a multiset of words over an alphabet.…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2008-02-03 Donald E. Knuth

Multiple (simple) context-free tree grammars are investigated, where "simple" means "linear and nondeleting". Every multiple context-free tree grammar that is finitely ambiguous can be lexicalized; i.e., it can be transformed into an…

Formal Languages and Automata Theory · Computer Science 2017-07-13 Joost Engelfriet , Andreas Maletti , Sebastian Maneth

We survey recent results on the topological complexity of context-free omega-languages which form the second level of the Chomsky hierarchy of languages of infinite words. In particular, we consider the Borel hierarchy and the Wadge…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2013-03-14 Olivier Finkel

We give a characterization of the sets of graphs that are both definable in Counting Monadic Second Order Logic (CMSO) and context-free, i.e., least solutions of Hyperedge-Replacement (HR) grammars introduced by Courcelle and Engelfriet. We…

Formal Languages and Automata Theory · Computer Science 2026-03-11 Radu Iosif , Florian Zuleger

Context-free S grammars are introduced, for arbitrary (storage) type S, as a uniform framework for recursion-based grammars, automata, and transducers, viewed as programs. To each occurrence of a nonterminal of a context-free S grammar an…

Formal Languages and Automata Theory · Computer Science 2014-08-05 Joost Engelfriet

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…

Formal Languages and Automata Theory · Computer Science 2025-02-03 Corentin Barloy , Michaël Cadilhac , Charles Paperman , Howard Straubing

In this paper, we study a series of algorithmic problems related to the subsequences occurring in the strings of a given language, under the assumption that this language is succinctly represented by a grammar generating it, or an automaton…

Formal Languages and Automata Theory · Computer Science 2024-10-11 Szilárd Zsolt Fazekas , Tore Koß , Florin Manea , Robert Mercaş , Timo Specht

This paper introduces an abstract notion of fragments of monadic second-order logic. This concept is based on purely syntactic closure properties. We show that over finite words, every logical fragment defines a lattice of languages with…

Formal Languages and Automata Theory · Computer Science 2015-03-20 Manfred Kufleitner , Alexander Lauser

We continue our study of ordered context-free grammars, a grammar formalism that places an order on the parse trees produced by the corresponding context-free grammar. In particular, we simplify our previous definition of a derivation of a…

Formal Languages and Automata Theory · Computer Science 2023-09-19 Brink van der Merwe

This thesis explores how concepts of formal language theory can be used to study left-orderable groups. It analyses the languages formed by their positive cones and demonstrates how the abstract families of languages (AFLs) in the Chomsky…

Group Theory · Mathematics 2025-12-09 Hang Lu Su

Monadic Second-Order Logic (MSO) extends First-Order Logic (FO) with variables ranging over sets and quantifications over those variables. We introduce and study Monadic Tree Logic (MTL), a fragment of MSO interpreted on infinite-tree…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2023-04-25 Massimo Benerecetti , Laura Bozzelli , Fabio Mogavero , Adriano Peron

Courcelle's famous theorem from 1990 states that any property of graphs definable in monadic second-order logic (MSO) can be decided in linear time on any class of graphs of bounded treewidth, or in other words, MSO is fixed-parameter…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2015-03-13 Stephan Kreutzer , Siamak Tazari