873 research outputs found
FO-definable transformations of infinite strings
The theory of regular and aperiodic transformations of finite strings has
recently received a lot of interest. These classes can be equivalently defined
using logic (Monadic second-order logic and first-order logic), two-way
machines (regular two-way and aperiodic two-way transducers), and one-way
register machines (regular streaming string and aperiodic streaming string
transducers). These classes are known to be closed under operations such as
sequential composition and regular (star-free) choice; and problems such as
functional equivalence and type checking, are decidable for these classes. On
the other hand, for infinite strings these results are only known for
-regular transformations: Alur, Filiot, and Trivedi studied
transformations of infinite strings and introduced an extension of streaming
string transducers over -strings and showed that they capture monadic
second-order definable transformations for infinite strings. In this paper we
extend their work to recover connection for infinite strings among first-order
logic definable transformations, aperiodic two-way transducers, and aperiodic
streaming string transducers
First-order definable string transformations
The connection between languages defined by computational models and logic
for languages is well-studied. Monadic second-order logic and finite automata
are shown to closely correspond to each-other for the languages of strings,
trees, and partial-orders. Similar connections are shown for first-order logic
and finite automata with certain aperiodicity restriction. Courcelle in 1994
proposed a way to use logic to define functions over structures where the
output structure is defined using logical formulas interpreted over the input
structure. Engelfriet and Hoogeboom discovered the corresponding "automata
connection" by showing that two-way generalised sequential machines capture the
class of monadic-second order definable transformations. Alur and Cerny further
refined the result by proposing a one-way deterministic transducer model with
string variables---called the streaming string transducers---to capture the
same class of transformations. In this paper we establish a transducer-logic
correspondence for Courcelle's first-order definable string transformations. We
propose a new notion of transition monoid for streaming string transducers that
involves structural properties of both underlying input automata and variable
dependencies. By putting an aperiodicity restriction on the transition monoids,
we define a class of streaming string transducers that captures exactly the
class of first-order definable transformations.Comment: 31 page
In the Maze of Data Languages
In data languages the positions of strings and trees carry a label from a
finite alphabet and a data value from an infinite alphabet. Extensions of
automata and logics over finite alphabets have been defined to recognize data
languages, both in the string and tree cases. In this paper we describe and
compare the complexity and expressiveness of such models to understand which
ones are better candidates as regular models
Aperiodic String Transducers
Regular string-to-string functions enjoy a nice triple characterization
through deterministic two-way transducers (2DFT), streaming string transducers
(SST) and MSO definable functions. This result has recently been lifted to FO
definable functions, with equivalent representations by means of aperiodic 2DFT
and aperiodic 1-bounded SST, extending a well-known result on regular
languages. In this paper, we give three direct transformations: i) from
1-bounded SST to 2DFT, ii) from 2DFT to copyless SST, and iii) from k-bounded
to 1-bounded SST. We give the complexity of each construction and also prove
that they preserve the aperiodicity of transducers. As corollaries, we obtain
that FO definable string-to-string functions are equivalent to SST whose
transition monoid is finite and aperiodic, and to aperiodic copyless SST
The descriptive complexity approach to LOGCFL
Building upon the known generalized-quantifier-based first-order
characterization of LOGCFL, we lay the groundwork for a deeper investigation.
Specifically, we examine subclasses of LOGCFL arising from varying the arity
and nesting of groupoidal quantifiers. Our work extends the elaborate theory
relating monoidal quantifiers to NC1 and its subclasses. In the absence of the
BIT predicate, we resolve the main issues: we show in particular that no single
outermost unary groupoidal quantifier with FO can capture all the context-free
languages, and we obtain the surprising result that a variant of Greibach's
``hardest context-free language'' is LOGCFL-complete under quantifier-free
BIT-free projections. We then prove that FO with unary groupoidal quantifiers
is strictly more expressive with the BIT predicate than without. Considering a
particular groupoidal quantifier, we prove that first-order logic with majority
of pairs is strictly more expressive than first-order with majority of
individuals. As a technical tool of independent interest, we define the notion
of an aperiodic nondeterministic finite automaton and prove that FO
translations are precisely the mappings computed by single-valued aperiodic
nondeterministic finite transducers.Comment: 10 pages, 1 figur
Regular and First Order List Functions
We define two classes of functions, called regular (respectively, first-order) list functions, which manipulate objects such as lists, lists of lists, pairs of lists, lists of pairs of lists, etc. The definition is in the style of regular expressions: the functions are constructed by starting with some basic functions (e.g. projections from pairs, or head and tail operations on lists) and putting them together using four combinators (most importantly, composition of functions). Our main results are that first-order list functions are exactly the same as first-order transductions, under a suitable encoding of the inputs; and the regular list functions are exactly the same as MSO-transductions
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