24 research outputs found
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
On the Expressive Power of 2-Stack Visibly Pushdown Automata
Visibly pushdown automata are input-driven pushdown automata that recognize
some non-regular context-free languages while preserving the nice closure and
decidability properties of finite automata. Visibly pushdown automata with
multiple stacks have been considered recently by La Torre, Madhusudan, and
Parlato, who exploit the concept of visibility further to obtain a rich
automata class that can even express properties beyond the class of
context-free languages. At the same time, their automata are closed under
boolean operations, have a decidable emptiness and inclusion problem, and enjoy
a logical characterization in terms of a monadic second-order logic over words
with an additional nesting structure. These results require a restricted
version of visibly pushdown automata with multiple stacks whose behavior can be
split up into a fixed number of phases. In this paper, we consider 2-stack
visibly pushdown automata (i.e., visibly pushdown automata with two stacks) in
their unrestricted form. We show that they are expressively equivalent to the
existential fragment of monadic second-order logic. Furthermore, it turns out
that monadic second-order quantifier alternation forms an infinite hierarchy
wrt words with multiple nestings. Combining these results, we conclude that
2-stack visibly pushdown automata are not closed under complementation.
Finally, we discuss the expressive power of B\"{u}chi 2-stack visibly pushdown
automata running on infinite (nested) words. Extending the logic by an infinity
quantifier, we can likewise establish equivalence to existential monadic
second-order logic
Weighted Logics for Nested Words and Algebraic Formal Power Series
Nested words, a model for recursive programs proposed by Alur and Madhusudan,
have recently gained much interest. In this paper we introduce quantitative
extensions and study nested word series which assign to nested words elements
of a semiring. We show that regular nested word series coincide with series
definable in weighted logics as introduced by Droste and Gastin. For this we
establish a connection between nested words and the free bisemigroup. Applying
our result, we obtain characterizations of algebraic formal power series in
terms of weighted logics. This generalizes results of Lautemann, Schwentick and
Therien on context-free languages
A B\"uchi-Elgot-Trakhtenbrot theorem for automata with MSO graph storage
We introduce MSO graph storage types, and call a storage type MSO-expressible
if it is isomorphic to some MSO graph storage type. An MSO graph storage type
has MSO-definable sets of graphs as storage configurations and as storage
transformations. We consider sequential automata with MSO graph storage and
associate with each such automaton a string language (in the usual way) and a
graph language; a graph is accepted by the automaton if it represents a correct
sequence of storage configurations for a given input string. For each MSO graph
storage type, we define an MSO logic which is a subset of the usual MSO logic
on graphs. We prove a B\"uchi-Elgot-Trakhtenbrot theorem, both for the string
case and the graph case. Moreover, we prove that (i) each MSO graph
transduction can be used as storage transformation in an MSO graph storage
type, (ii) every automatic storage type is MSO-expressible, and (iii) the
pushdown operator on storage types preserves the property of
MSO-expressibility. Thus, the iterated pushdown storage types are
MSO-expressible