形式语言与自动机理论

Using automata-theoretic approach, Giambruno and Restivo have investigated on the intersection of two finitely generated submonoids of the free monoid over a finite alphabet. In particular, they have obtained Hanna Neumann property for a…

Pushdown automata may contain transitions that are never used in any accepting run of the automaton. We present an algorithm for detecting such useless transitions. A finite automaton that captures the possible stack content during runs of…

The tight upper bound on the state complexity of the reverse of R-trivial and J-trivial regular languages of the state complexity n is 2^{n-1}. The witness is ternary for R-trivial regular languages and (n-1)-ary for J-trivial regular…

It is decidable if a set of numbers, whose representation in a base b is a regular language, is ultimately periodic. This was established by Honkala in 1986. We give here a structural description of minimal automata that accept an…

We define compact automata and show that every language has a unique minimal compact automaton. We also define recognition of languages by compact left semitopological monoids and construct the analogue of the syntactic monoid in this…

Higher-order counter automata (\HOCS) can be either seen as a restriction of higher-order pushdown automata (\HOPS) to a unary stack alphabet, or as an extension of counter automata to higher levels. We distinguish two principal kinds of…

For any context-free grammar, we build a transition diagram, that is, a finite directed graph with labeled arcs, which describes the work of the grammar. This approach is new, and it is different from previously known graph models. We…

This work is a contribution to the study of set of the representations of integers in a rational base number system. This prefix-closed subset of the free monoid is naturally represented as a highly non regular tree whose nodes are the…

In a recent thread of papers, we have introduced FQL, a precise specification language for test coverage, and developed the test case generation engine FShell for ANSI C. In essence, an FQL test specification amounts to a set of regular…

We relate two measures of complexity of regular languages. The first is syntactic complexity, that is, the cardinality of the syntactic semigroup of the language. That semigroup is isomorphic to the semigroup of transformations of states…

State minimization is a fundamental problem in automata theory. The problem is also of great importance in the study of fuzzy automata. However, most work in the literature considered only state reduction of fuzzy automata, whereas the…

We investigate abelian repetitions in Sturmian words. We exploit a bijection between factors of Sturmian words and subintervals of the unitary segment that allows us to study the periods of abelian repetitions by using classical results of…

The decidability of determining equivalence of deterministic multitape automata (or transducers) was a longstanding open problem until it was resolved by Harju and Karhum\"{a}ki in the early 1990s. Their proof of decidability yields a co_NP…

We study representations of ideal languages by means of strongly connected synchronizing automata. For every finitely generated ideal language L we construct such an automaton with at most 2^n states, where n is the maximal length of words…

Additive Cost Register Automata (ACRA) map strings to integers using a finite set of registers that are updated using assignments of the form "x := y + c" at every step. The corresponding class of additive regular functions has multiple…

Any two-way finite state automaton is equivalent to some one-way finite state automaton. This well-known result, shown by Rabin and Scott and independently by Shepherdson, states that two-way finite state automata (even non-deterministic)…

Separation is a classical problem asking whether, given two sets belonging to some class, it is possible to separate them by a set from a smaller class. We discuss the separation problem for regular languages. We give a Ptime algorithm to…

We give a Kleene-type operational characterization of Muller context-free languages (MCFLs) of well-ordered and scattered words.

We give a forbidden pattern characterization for the class of generalized definite languages, show that the corresponding problem is NL-complete and can be solved in quadratic time. We also show that their syntactic complexity coincides…

In this paper we consider the following problems: how many different subsets of Sigma^n can occur as set of all length-n factors of a finite word? If a subset is representable, how long a word do we need to represent it? How many such…