3 research outputs found
A Trichotomy for Regular Simple Path Queries on Graphs
Regular path queries (RPQs) select nodes connected by some path in a graph.
The edge labels of such a path have to form a word that matches a given regular
expression. We investigate the evaluation of RPQs with an additional constraint
that prevents multiple traversals of the same nodes. Those regular simple path
queries (RSPQs) find several applications in practice, yet they quickly become
intractable, even for basic languages such as (aa)* or a*ba*.
In this paper, we establish a comprehensive classification of regular
languages with respect to the complexity of the corresponding regular simple
path query problem. More precisely, we identify the fragment that is maximal in
the following sense: regular simple path queries can be evaluated in polynomial
time for every regular language L that belongs to this fragment and evaluation
is NP-complete for languages outside this fragment. We thus fully characterize
the frontier between tractability and intractability for RSPQs, and we refine
our results to show the following trichotomy: Evaluations of RSPQs is either
AC0, NL-complete or NP-complete in data complexity, depending on the regular
language L. The fragment identified also admits a simple characterization in
terms of regular expressions.
Finally, we also discuss the complexity of the following decision problem:
decide, given a language L, whether finding a regular simple path for L is
tractable. We consider several alternative representations of L: DFAs, NFAs or
regular expressions, and prove that this problem is NL-complete for the first
representation and PSPACE-complete for the other two. As a conclusion we extend
our results from edge-labeled graphs to vertex-labeled graphs and vertex-edge
labeled graphs.Comment: 15 pages, conference submissio