Universality of Confluent, Self-Loop Deterministic Partially Ordered NFAs is Hard
Abstract
An automaton is partially ordered if the only cycles in its transition diagram are self-loops. The expressivity of partially ordered NFAs (poNFAs) can be characterized by the Straubing-Th\'erien hierarchy. Level 3/2 is recognized by poNFAs, level 1 by confluent, self-loop deterministic poNFAs as well as by confluent poDFAs, and level 1/2 by saturated poNFAs. We study the universality problem for confluent, self-loop deterministic poNFAs. It asks whether an automaton accepts all words over its alphabet. Universality for both NFAs and poNFAs is a PSpace-complete problem. For confluent, self-loop deterministic poNFAs, the complexity drops to coNP-complete if the alphabet is fixed but is open if the alphabet may grow. We solve this problem by showing that it is PSpace-complete if the alphabet may grow polynomially. Consequently, our result provides a lower-bound complexity for some other problems, including inclusion, equivalence, and -piecewise testability. Since universality for saturated poNFAs is easy, confluent, self-loop deterministic poNFAs are the simplest and natural kind of NFAs characterizing a well-known class of languages, for which deciding universality is as difficult as for general NFAs.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1704.07860,
title = {Universality of Confluent, Self-Loop Deterministic Partially Ordered NFAs is Hard},
author = {Tomáš Masopust and Markus Krötzsch},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1704.07860},
year = {2017}
}
Comments
arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1609.03460