On generic context lemmas for lambda calculi with sharing

This paper proves several generic variants of context lemmas and thus contributes to improving the tools to develop observational semantics that is based on a reduction semantics for a language. The context lemmas are provided for may- as well as two variants of mustconvergence and a wide class of extended lambda calculi, which satisfy certain abstract conditions. The calculi must have a form of node sharing, e.g. plain beta reduction is not permitted. There are two variants, weakly sharing calculi, where the beta-reduction is only permitted for arguments that are variables, and strongly sharing calculi, which roughly correspond to call-by-need calculi, where beta-reduction is completely replaced by a sharing variant. The calculi must obey three abstract assumptions, which are in general easily recognizable given the syntax and the reduction rules. The generic context lemmas have as instances several context lemmas already proved in the literature for specific lambda calculi with sharing. The scope of the generic context lemmas comprises not only call-by-need calculi, but also call-by-value calculi with a form of built-in sharing. Investigations in other, new variants of extended lambda-calculi with sharing, where the language or the reduction rules and/or strategy varies, will be simplified by our result, since specific context lemmas are immediately derivable from the generic context lemma, provided our abstract conditions are met

More Structural Characterizations of Some Subregular Language Families by Biautomata

We study structural restrictions on biautomata such as, e.g., acyclicity, permutation-freeness, strongly permutation-freeness, and orderability, to mention a few. We compare the obtained language families with those induced by deterministic finite automata with the same property. In some cases, it is shown that there is no difference in characterization between deterministic finite automata and biautomata as for the permutation-freeness, but there are also other cases, where it makes a big difference whether one considers deterministic finite automata or biautomata. This is, for instance, the case when comparing strongly permutation-freeness, which results in the family of definite language for deterministic finite automata, while biautomata induce the family of finite and co-finite languages. The obtained results nicely fall into the known landscape on classical language families.Comment: In Proceedings AFL 2014, arXiv:1405.527

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

Word problems recognisable by deterministic blind monoid automata

We consider blind, deterministic, finite automata equipped with a register which stores an element of a given monoid, and which is modified by right multiplication by monoid elements. We show that, for monoids M drawn from a large class including groups, such an automaton accepts the word problem of a group H if and only if H has a finite index subgroup which embeds in the group of units of M. In the case that M is a group, this answers a question of Elston and Ostheimer.Comment: 8 pages, fixed some typos and clarified ambiguity in the abstract, results unchange

Learning cover context-free grammars from structural data

We consider the problem of learning an unknown context-free grammar when the only knowledge available and of interest to the learner is about its structural descriptions with depth at most $\ell.$ The goal is to learn a cover context-free grammar (CCFG) with respect to $\ell$, that is, a CFG whose structural descriptions with depth at most $\ell$ agree with those of the unknown CFG. We propose an algorithm, called $LA^\ell$, that efficiently learns a CCFG using two types of queries: structural equivalence and structural membership. We show that $LA^\ell$ runs in time polynomial in the number of states of a minimal deterministic finite cover tree automaton (DCTA) with respect to $\ell$. This number is often much smaller than the number of states of a minimum deterministic finite tree automaton for the structural descriptions of the unknown grammar