A Note on Limited Pushdown Alphabets in Stateless Deterministic Pushdown Automata

Recently, an infinite hierarchy of languages accepted by stateless deterministic pushdown automata has been established based on the number of pushdown symbols. However, the witness language for the n-th level of the hierarchy is over an input alphabet with 2(n-1) elements. In this paper, we improve this result by showing that a binary alphabet is sufficient to establish this hierarchy. As a consequence of our construction, we solve the open problem formulated by Meduna et al. Then we extend these results to m-state realtime deterministic pushdown automata, for all m at least 1. The existence of such a hierarchy for m-state deterministic pushdown automata is left open

Regular Methods for Operator Precedence Languages

The operator precedence languages (OPLs) represent the largest known subclass of the context-free languages which enjoys all desirable closure and decidability properties. This includes the decidability of language inclusion, which is the ultimate verification problem. Operator precedence grammars, automata, and logics have been investigated and used, for example, to verify programs with arithmetic expressions and exceptions (both of which are deterministic pushdown but lie outside the scope of the visibly pushdown languages). In this paper, we complete the picture and give, for the first time, an algebraic characterization of the class of OPLs in the form of a syntactic congruence that has finitely many equivalence classes exactly for the operator precedence languages. This is a generalization of the celebrated Myhill-Nerode theorem for the regular languages to OPLs. As one of the consequences, we show that universality and language inclusion for nondeterministic operator precedence automata can be solved by an antichain algorithm. Antichain algorithms avoid determinization and complementation through an explicit subset construction, by leveraging a quasi-order on words, which allows the pruning of the search space for counterexample words without sacrificing completeness. Antichain algorithms can be implemented symbolically, and these implementations are today the best-performing algorithms in practice for the inclusion of finite automata. We give a generic construction of the quasi-order needed for antichain algorithms from a finite syntactic congruence. This yields the first antichain algorithm for OPLs, an algorithm that solves the ExpTime-hard language inclusion problem for OPLs in exponential time

Fling - A Fluent API Generator

We present the first general and practical solution of the fluent API problem - an algorithm, that given a deterministic language (equivalently, LR(k), k >= 0 language) encodes it in an unbounded parametric polymorphism type system employing only a polynomial number of types. The theoretical result is accompanied by an actual tool Fling - a fluent API compiler-compiler in the venue of YACC, tailored for embedding DSLs in Java

Towards a Uniform Theory of Effectful State Machines

Using recent developments in coalgebraic and monad-based semantics, we present a uniform study of various notions of machines, e.g. finite state machines, multi-stack machines, Turing machines, valence automata, and weighted automata. They are instances of Jacobs' notion of a T-automaton, where T is a monad. We show that the generic language semantics for T-automata correctly instantiates the usual language semantics for a number of known classes of machines/languages, including regular, context-free, recursively-enumerable and various subclasses of context free languages (e.g. deterministic and real-time ones). Moreover, our approach provides new generic techniques for studying the expressivity power of various machine-based models.Comment: final version accepted by TOC

26. Theorietag Automaten und Formale Sprachen 23. Jahrestagung Logik in der Informatik: Tagungsband

Der Theorietag ist die Jahrestagung der Fachgruppe Automaten und Formale Sprachen der Gesellschaft für Informatik und fand erstmals 1991 in Magdeburg statt. Seit dem Jahr 1996 wird der Theorietag von einem eintägigen Workshop mit eingeladenen Vorträgen begleitet. Die Jahrestagung der Fachgruppe Logik in der Informatik der Gesellschaft für Informatik fand erstmals 1993 in Leipzig statt. Im Laufe beider Jahrestagungen finden auch die jährliche Fachgruppensitzungen statt. In diesem Jahr wird der Theorietag der Fachgruppe Automaten und Formale Sprachen erstmalig zusammen mit der Jahrestagung der Fachgruppe Logik in der Informatik abgehalten. Organisiert wurde die gemeinsame Veranstaltung von der Arbeitsgruppe Zuverlässige Systeme des Instituts für Informatik an der Christian-Albrechts-Universität Kiel vom 4. bis 7. Oktober im Tagungshotel Tannenfelde bei Neumünster. Während des Tre↵ens wird ein Workshop für alle Interessierten statt finden. In Tannenfelde werden • Christoph Löding (Aachen) • Tomás Masopust (Dresden) • Henning Schnoor (Kiel) • Nicole Schweikardt (Berlin) • Georg Zetzsche (Paris) eingeladene Vorträge zu ihrer aktuellen Arbeit halten. Darüber hinaus werden 26 Vorträge von Teilnehmern und Teilnehmerinnen gehalten, 17 auf dem Theorietag Automaten und formale Sprachen und neun auf der Jahrestagung Logik in der Informatik. Der vorliegende Band enthält Kurzfassungen aller Beiträge. Wir danken der Gesellschaft für Informatik, der Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel und dem Tagungshotel Tannenfelde für die Unterstützung dieses Theorietags. Ein besonderer Dank geht an das Organisationsteam: Maike Bradler, Philipp Sieweck, Joel Day. Kiel, Oktober 2016 Florin Manea, Dirk Nowotka und Thomas Wilk

jsFLAP: A JavaScript Formal Languages and Automata Package for Computer Science Education

Visualization and simulation software serves an important role in education, especially in the education of abstract topics. The field of computational theory, and specifically the topics of formal languages and finite automata are well suited to visualization. When done properly, this improves the learning experience for both students and educators. The JavaScript Formal Languages and Automata Package (jsFLAP) was created to facilitate the construction and simulation of different types of finite state automata. Following best practices for visualization design, jsFLAP was designed to be accessible and easy to use. It aims to reduce frustration for students, allowing them to focus on engaging directly with the underlying concepts, and to require as little technological overhead as possible for instructors wishing to integrate it into their curriculum. In doing this, jsFLAP can serve an important role in the education of computing theory, replacing existing automata construction tools or reaching audiences that those tools could not.Keywords: computer science, education, visualization, formal languages, automat

Real-time multipushdown and multicounter automata networks and hierarchies

Ph.D.William I. Grosk

The Neural Network Pushdown Automaton: Model, Stack and Learning Simulations

In order for neural networks to learn complex languages or grammars, they must have sufficient computational power or resources to recognize or generate such languages. Though many approaches have been discussed, one obvious approach to enhancing the processing power of a recurrent neural network is to couple it with an external stack memory - in effect creating a neural network pushdown automata (NNPDA). This paper discusses in detail this NNPDA - its construction, how it can be trained and how useful symbolic information can be extracted from the trained network. In order to couple the external stack to the neural network, an optimization method is developed which uses an error function that connects the learning of the state automaton of the neural network to the learning of the operation of the external stack. To minimize the error function using gradient descent learning, an analog stack is designed such that the action and storage of information in the stack are continuous. One interpretation of a continuous stack is the probabilistic storage of and action on data. After training on sample strings of an unknown source grammar, a quantization procedure extracts from the analog stack and neural network a discrete pushdown automata (PDA). Simulations show that in learning deterministic context-free grammars - the balanced parenthesis language, 1n0n, and the deterministic Palindrome - the extracted PDA is correct in the sense that it can correctly recognize unseen strings of arbitrary length. In addition, the extracted PDAs can be shown to be identical or equivalent to the PDAs of the source grammars which were used to generate the training strings. (Also cross-referenced as UMIACS-TR-93-77.