Related papers: Formal languages and groups as memory
We develop fibrational perspectives on context-free grammars and on nondeterministic finite-state automata over categories and operads. A generalized CFG is a functor from a free colored operad (aka multicategory) generated by a pointed…
We show how to efficiently enumerate a class of finite-memory stochastic processes using the causal representation of epsilon-machines. We characterize epsilon-machines in the language of automata theory and adapt a recent algorithm for…
It is known that 2-state binary and 3-state unary probabilistic finite automata and 2-state unary quantum finite automata recognize uncountably many languages with cutpoints. These results have been obtained by associating each recognized…
We study subsets of groups and monoids defined by language-theoretic means, generalizing the classical approach to the word problem. We expand on results by Herbst from 1991 to a more general setting, and for a class of languages…
Nested words introduced by Alur and Madhusudan are used to capture structures with both linear and hierarchical order, e.g. XML documents, without losing valuable closure properties. Furthermore, Alur and Madhusudan introduced automata and…
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…
We give a short and self-contained proof of a theorem of Ledermann and Neumann stating that there are only finitely many finite groups with a given number of automorphisms. We also discuss the history of related conjectures.
For an arbitrary group $G$ and arbitrary set $A$, we define a monoid structure on the set of all uniformly continuous functions $A^G\to A$ and then we show that it is naturally isomorphic to the monoid of cellular automata $\mathrm{CA}(G,…
We establish several results on the word problem for just infinite groups. First, for finitely generated just infinite groups we show that the word problem is uniformly decidable for presentations with recursively enumerable sets of…
The article defines and studies the genus of finite state deterministic automata (FSA) and regular languages. Indeed, a FSA can be seen as a graph for which the notion of genus arises. At the same time, a FSA has a semantics via its…
Language models (LMs) are often expected to generate strings in some formal language; for example, structured data, API calls, or code snippets. Although LMs can be tuned to improve their adherence to formal syntax, this does not guarantee…
Systems now exist which are able to compile unification grammars into language models that can be included in a speech recognizer, but it is so far unclear whether non-trivial linguistically principled grammars can be used for this purpose.…
This paper considers finite-automata based algorithms for handling linear arithmetic with both real and integer variables. Previous work has shown that this theory can be dealt with by using finite automata on infinite words, but this…
In this chapter we discuss the problem of enumerating distinct regular expressions by size and the regular languages they represent. We discuss various notions of the size of a regular expression that appear in the literature and their…
Futrell and Mahowald (2025) frame the success of neural language models (LMs) as supporting gradient, usage-based linguistic theories. I argue that LMs can also instantiate theories based on formal structures - the types of theories seen in…
We construct an extension $E(A,G)$ of a given group $G$ by infinite non-Archimedean words over an discretely ordered abelian group like $Z^n$. This yields an effective and uniform method to study various groups that "behave like $G$". We…
This paper contains a stronger version of a final identification theorem for the `generic' groups of finite Morley rank.
In this paper we develop little further the theory of quantum finite automata (QFA). There are already few properties of QFA known, that deterministic and probabilistic finite automata do not have e.g. they cannot recognize all regular…
Traditionally, formal languages are defined as sets of words. More recently, the alternative coalgebraic or coinductive representation as infinite tries, i.e., prefix trees branching over the alphabet, has been used to obtain compact and…
We contribute to the refined understanding of the language-logic-algebra interplay in the context of first-order properties of countable words. We establish decidable algebraic characterizations of one variable fragment of FO as well as…