Related papers: A language theoretic analysis of combings

We consider the class of groups whose word problem is poly-context-free; that is, an intersection of finitely many context-free languages. We show that any group which is virtually a finitely generated subgroup of a direct product of free…

Rational word languages can be defined by several equivalent means: finite state automata, rational expressions, finite congruences, or monadic second-order (MSO) logic. The robust subclass of aperiodic languages is defined by: counter-free…

I introduce modal group theory, in which we study the category of all groups, considering embeddability as providing a notion of modal possibility. Using HNN extensions and Britton's lemma, I demonstrate that the modal language of groups is…

We consider some questions about formal languages that arise when inverses of letters, words and languages are defined. The reduced representation of a language over the free monoid is its unique equivalent representation in the free group.…

Epistemic logics of intensional groups lift the assumption that membership in a group of agents is common knowledge. Instead of being represented directly as a set of agents, intensional groups are represented by a property that may change…

Anisimov and Seifert show that a group has a regular word problem ifand only if it is finite. Muller and Schupp (together with Dunwoody's accessibility result) show that a group has context free word problem if and only if it is virtually…

The study of finite automata and regular languages is a privileged meeting point of algebra and logic. Since the work of Buchi, regular languages have been classified according to their descriptive complexity, i.e. the type of logical…

I investigate modal group theory for arbitrary homomorphisms. Possibility is interpreted by the existence of a group homomorphism out of the given group, so the semantics is governed by the possibility of collapse: elements may be…

The literature on word-representable graphs is quite rich, and a number of variations of the original definition have been proposed over the years. We are initiating a systematic study of such variations based on formal languages. In our…

We investigate a signed version of the Hammersley process, a discrete process on words related to a property of integer sequences called heapability (Byers et al., ANALCO 2011). The specific version that we investigate corresponds to a…

A group is metabelian if its commutator subgroup is abelian. For finitely generated metabelian groups, classical commutative algebra, algebraic geometry and geometric group theory, especially the latter two subjects, can be brought to bear…

Whether language models (LMs) have inductive biases that favor typologically frequent grammatical properties over rare, implausible ones has been investigated, typically using artificial languages (ALs) (White and Cotterell, 2021;…

Since the early Sixties and Seventies it has been known that the regular and context-free languages are characterized by definability in the monadic second-order theory of certain structures. More recently, these descriptive…

We study Monadic Second-Order Logic (MSO) over finite words, extended with (non-uniform arbitrary) monadic predicates. We show that it defines a class of languages that has algebraic, automata-theoretic and machine-independent…

It is proved that, in certain subgroups of direct products of countable groups, the property of being an unconditionally closed set coincides with that of being an algebraic set. In particular, these properties coincide in all Abelian…

We introduce the Insertion Chain Complex, a higher-dimensional extension of insertion graphs, as a new framework for analyzing finite sets of words. We study its topological and combinatorial properties, in particular its homology groups,…

A function on a discrete group is weakly combable if its discrete derivative with respect to a combing can be calculated by a finite state automaton. A weakly combable function is bicombable if it is Lipschitz in both the left and right…

We introduce regular languages of morphisms in free monoidal categories, with their associated grammars and automata. These subsume the classical theory of regular languages of words and trees, but also open up a much wider class of…

These are lecture notes on the algebraic approach to regular languages. The classical algebraic approach is for finite words; it uses semigroups instead of automata. However, the algebraic approach can be extended to structures beyond…

We give a simpler proof using automata theory of a recent result of Kapovich, Weidmann and Myasnikov according to which so-called benign graphs of groups preserve decidability of the generalized word problem. These include graphs of groups…