On the Complexity of the Relative Inclusion Star Height Problem

Given a family of recognizable languages L1, . . . ,Lm and recognizable languages K1 ⊆ K2, the relative inclusion star height problem means to compute the minimal star height of some rational expression r over L1, . . . ,Lm satisfying K1 ⊆ L(r) ⊆ K2. We show that this problem is of elementary complexity and give a detailed analysis its complexity depending on the representation of K1 and K2 and whether L1, . . . ,Lm are singletons

Regular Cost Functions, Part I: Logic and Algebra over Words

The theory of regular cost functions is a quantitative extension to the classical notion of regularity. A cost function associates to each input a non-negative integer value (or infinity), as opposed to languages which only associate to each input the two values "inside" and "outside". This theory is a continuation of the works on distance automata and similar models. These models of automata have been successfully used for solving the star-height problem, the finite power property, the finite substitution problem, the relative inclusion star-height problem and the boundedness problem for monadic-second order logic over words. Our notion of regularity can be -- as in the classical theory of regular languages -- equivalently defined in terms of automata, expressions, algebraic recognisability, and by a variant of the monadic second-order logic. These equivalences are strict extensions of the corresponding classical results. The present paper introduces the cost monadic logic, the quantitative extension to the notion of monadic second-order logic we use, and show that some problems of existence of bounds are decidable for this logic. This is achieved by introducing the corresponding algebraic formalism: stabilisation monoids.Comment: 47 page

Distance Desert Automata and Star Height Substitutions

We introduce the notion of nested distance desert automata as a joint generalization and further development of distance automata and desert automata. We show that limitedness of nested distance desert automata is PSPACE-complete. As an application, we show that it is decidable in 22O(n2) space whether the language accepted by an n-state non-deterministic automaton is of a star height less than a given integer h (concerning rational expressions with union, concatenation and iteration). We also show some decidability results for some substitution problems for recognizable languages