On the decomposition of finite-valued streaming string transducers

We prove the following decomposition theorem: every 1-register streaming string transducer that associates a uniformly bounded number of outputs with each input can be effectively decomposed as a finite union of functional 1-register streaming string transducers. This theorem relies on a combinatorial result by Kortelainen concerning word equations with iterated factors. Our result implies the decidability of the equivalence problem for the considered class of transducers. This can be seen as a first step towards proving a more general decomposition theorem for streaming string transducers with multiple registers

A Regular and Complete Notion of Delay for Streaming String Transducers

The notion of delay between finite transducers is a core element of numerous fundamental results of transducer theory. The goal of this work is to provide a similar notion for more complex abstract machines: we introduce a new notion of delay tailored to measure the similarity between streaming string transducers (SST). We show that our notion is regular: we design a finite automaton that can check whether the delay between any two SSTs executions is smaller than some given bound. As a consequence, our notion enjoys good decidability properties: in particular, while equivalence between non-deterministic SSTs is undecidable, we show that equivalence up to fixed delay is decidable. Moreover, we show that our notion has good completeness properties: we prove that two SSTs are equivalent if and only if they are equivalent up to some (computable) bounded delay. Together with the regularity of our delay notion, it provides an alternative proof that SSTs equivalence is decidable. Finally, the definition of our delay notion is machine-independent, as it only depends on the origin semantics of SSTs. As a corollary, the completeness result also holds for equivalent machine models such as deterministic two-way transducers, or MSO transducers

The many facets of string transducers

Regular word transductions extend the robust notion of regular languages from a qualitative to a quantitative reasoning. They were already considered in early papers of formal language theory, but turned out to be much more challenging. The last decade brought considerable research around various transducer models, aiming to achieve similar robustness as for automata and languages. In this paper we survey some older and more recent results on string transducers. We present classical connections between automata, logic and algebra extended to transducers, some genuine definability questions, and review approaches to the equivalence problem

Equivalence of finite-valued streaming string transducers is decidable

In this paper we provide a positive answer to a question left open by Alur and and Deshmukh in 2011 by showing that equivalence of finite-valued copyless streaming string transducers is decidable

Learning probability distributions generated by finite-state machines

We review methods for inference of probability distributions generated by probabilistic automata and related models for sequence generation. We focus on methods that can be proved to learn in the inference in the limit and PAC formal models. The methods we review are state merging and state splitting methods for probabilistic deterministic automata and the recently developed spectral method for nondeterministic probabilistic automata. In both cases, we derive them from a high-level algorithm described in terms of the Hankel matrix of the distribution to be learned, given as an oracle, and then describe how to adapt that algorithm to account for the error introduced by a finite sample.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Composing Copyless Streaming String Transducers

Streaming string transducers (SSTs) implement string-to-string transformations by reading each input word in a single left-to-right pass while maintaining fragments of potential outputs in a finite set of string variables. These variables get updated on transitions of the transducer, where they can be assigned new values described by concatenations of variables and output symbols. An SST is called copyless if every update is such that no variable occurs more than once amongst all of the assigned expressions. The transformations realized by copyless SSTs coincide with Courcelle's monadic second-order logic graph transducers (MSOTs) when restricted to string graphs. Copyless SSTs with nondeterminism are known to be equivalent to nondeterministic MSOTs as well. MSOTs, both deterministic and nondeterministic, are closed under composition. Given the equivalence of MSOTs and copyless SSTs, it is easy to see that copyless SSTs are also closed under composition. The original proof of this fact, however, was based on a direct construction to produce a composite copyless SST from two given copyless SSTs. A counterexample discovered by Joost Englefriet showed that this construction may produce copyful transducers. We revisit the original composition constructions for both deterministic and nondeterministic SSTs and show that, although they can introduce copyful updates, the resulting copyful behavior they exhibit is superficial. To characterize this mild copyful behavior, we define a subclass of copyful SSTs, called diamond-free SSTs, in which two copies of a common variable are never combined in any subsequent assignment. In order to recover a modified version of the original construction, we provide a method for producing an equivalent copyless SST from any diamond-free copyful SST

On one-way cellular automata with a fixed number of cells

We investigate a restricted one-way cellular automaton (OCA) model where the number of cells is bounded by a constant number k, so-called kC-OCAs. In contrast to the general model, the generative capacity of the restricted model is reduced to the set of regular languages. A kC-OCA can be algorithmically converted to a deterministic finite automaton (DFA). The blow-up in the number of states is bounded by a polynomial of degree k. We can exhibit a family of unary languages which shows that this upper bound is tight in order of magnitude. We then study upper and lower bounds for the trade-off when converting DFAs to kC-OCAs. We show that there are regular languages where the use of kC-OCAs cannot reduce the number of states when compared to DFAs. We then investigate trade-offs between kC-OCAs with different numbers of cells and finally treat the problem of minimizing a given kC-OCA