Some undecidability results concerning the property of preserving regularity

AbstractA finite string-rewriting system R preserves regularity if and only if it preserves Σ-regularity, where Σ is the alphabet containing exactly those letters that have occurrences in the rules of R. This proves a conjecture of Gyenizse and Vágvölgyi (1997). In addition, some undecidability results are presented that generalize results of Gilleron and Tison (1995) from term-rewriting systems to string-rewriting systems. It follows that the property of being regularity preserving is undecidable for term-rewriting systems, thus answering another question of Gyenizse and Vágvölgyi (1997). Finally, it is shown that it is undecidable in general whether a finite, lengthreducing, and confluent string-rewriting system yields a regular set of normal forms for each regular language

Provenance Circuits for Trees and Treelike Instances (Extended Version)

Query evaluation in monadic second-order logic (MSO) is tractable on trees and treelike instances, even though it is hard for arbitrary instances. This tractability result has been extended to several tasks related to query evaluation, such as counting query results [3] or performing query evaluation on probabilistic trees [10]. These are two examples of the more general problem of computing augmented query output, that is referred to as provenance. This article presents a provenance framework for trees and treelike instances, by describing a linear-time construction of a circuit provenance representation for MSO queries. We show how this provenance can be connected to the usual definitions of semiring provenance on relational instances [20], even though we compute it in an unusual way, using tree automata; we do so via intrinsic definitions of provenance for general semirings, independent of the operational details of query evaluation. We show applications of this provenance to capture existing counting and probabilistic results on trees and treelike instances, and give novel consequences for probability evaluation.Comment: 48 pages. Presented at ICALP'1

Mappings and grammars on trees

Mappings and grammars on trees for automata theor

One-variable context-free hedge automata

International audienceWe introduce an extension of hedge automata called One-Variable Context-Free Hedge Automata. The class of unranked ordered tree languages they recognize has polynomial membership problem and is preserved by rewrite closure with inverse-monadic rules. We also propose a modeling of primitives of the W3C XQuery Update Facility by mean of parameterized rewriting rules, and show that the rewrite closure of a context-free hedge language with these extended rewriting systems is a context-free hedge language. This result is applied to static analysis of XML access control policies expressed with update primitives

Tree Automata Techniques and Applications

International audienc