89 research outputs found
A Characterization for Decidable Separability by Piecewise Testable Languages
The separability problem for word languages of a class by
languages of a class asks, for two given languages and
from , whether there exists a language from that
includes and excludes , that is, and . In this work, we assume some mild closure properties for
and study for which such classes separability by a piecewise
testable language (PTL) is decidable. We characterize these classes in terms of
decidability of (two variants of) an unboundedness problem. From this, we
deduce that separability by PTL is decidable for a number of language classes,
such as the context-free languages and languages of labeled vector addition
systems. Furthermore, it follows that separability by PTL is decidable if and
only if one can compute for any language of the class its downward closure wrt.
the scattered substring ordering (i.e., if the set of scattered substrings of
any language of the class is effectively regular).
The obtained decidability results contrast some undecidability results. In
fact, for all (non-regular) language classes that we present as examples with
decidable separability, it is undecidable whether a given language is a PTL
itself.
Our characterization involves a result of independent interest, which states
that for any kind of languages and , non-separability by PTL is
equivalent to the existence of common patterns in and
Deciding Piecewise Testable Separability for Regular Tree Languages
The piecewise testable separability problem asks, given two input languages, whether there exists a piecewise testable language that contains the first input language and is disjoint from the second. We prove a general characterisation of piecewise testable separability on languages in a well-quasiorder, in terms of ideals of the ordering. This subsumes the known characterisations in the case of finite words. In the case of finite ranked trees ordered by homeomorphic embedding, we show using effective representations for tree ideals that it entails the decidability of piecewise testable separability when the input languages are regular. A final byproduct is a new proof of the decidability of whether an input regular language of ranked trees is piecewise testable, which was first shown in the unranked case by Bojanczyk, Segoufin, and Straubing [Log. Meth. in Comput. Sci., 8(3:26), 2012]
Regular Separability and Intersection Emptiness Are Independent Problems
The problem of regular separability asks, given two languages K and L, whether there exists a regular language S that includes K and is disjoint from L. This problem becomes interesting when the input languages K and L are drawn from language classes beyond the regular languages. For such classes, a mild and useful assumption is that they are full trios, i.e. closed under rational transductions.
All the results on regular separability for full trios obtained so far exhibited a noteworthy correspondence with the intersection emptiness problem: In each case, regular separability is decidable if and only if intersection emptiness is decidable. This raises the question whether for full trios, regular separability can be reduced to intersection emptiness or vice-versa.
We present counterexamples showing that neither of the two problems can be reduced to the other. More specifically, we describe full trios C_1, D_1, C_2, D_2 such that (i) intersection emptiness is decidable for C_1 and D_1, but regular separability is undecidable for C_1 and D_1 and (ii) regular separability is decidable for C_2 and D_2, but intersection emptiness is undecidable for C_2 and D_2
Invisible pushdown languages
Context free languages allow one to express data with hierarchical structure,
at the cost of losing some of the useful properties of languages recognized by
finite automata on words. However, it is possible to restore some of these
properties by making the structure of the tree visible, such as is done by
visibly pushdown languages, or finite automata on trees. In this paper, we show
that the structure given by such approaches remains invisible when it is read
by a finite automaton (on word). In particular, we show that separability with
a regular language is undecidable for visibly pushdown languages, just as it is
undecidable for general context free languages
Regular Separability of Parikh Automata
We investigate a subclass of languages recognized by vector addition systems, namely languages of nondeterministic Parikh automata. While the regularity problem (is the language of a given automaton regular?) is undecidable for this model, we surprisingly show decidability of the regular separability problem: given two Parikh automata, is there a regular language that contains one of them and is disjoint from the other? We supplement this result by proving undecidability of the same problem already for languages of visibly one counter automata
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