English

Swapping Lemmas for Regular and Context-Free Languages

Computational Complexity 2009-03-05 v2 Computation and Language Formal Languages and Automata Theory

Abstract

In formal language theory, one of the most fundamental tools, known as pumping lemmas, is extremely useful for regular and context-free languages. However, there are natural properties for which the pumping lemmas are of little use. One of such examples concerns a notion of advice, which depends only on the size of an underlying input. A standard pumping lemma encounters difficulty in proving that a given language is not regular in the presence of advice. We develop its substitution, called a swapping lemma for regular languages, to demonstrate the non-regularity of a target language with advice. For context-free languages, we also present a similar form of swapping lemma, which serves as a technical tool to show that certain languages are not context-free with advice.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.0808.4122,
  title  = {Swapping Lemmas for Regular and Context-Free Languages},
  author = {Tomoyuki Yamakami},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0808.4122},
  year   = {2009}
}

Comments

Version 2: minor chages associated with typos; slight changes of title, abstract, and introduction (letter size, 13 pages, 4 figures)

R2 v1 2026-06-21T11:15:07.330Z