25,047 research outputs found
Deciding Equivalence of Linear Tree-to-Word Transducers in Polynomial Time
We show that the equivalence of deterministic linear top-down tree-to-word
transducers is decidable in polynomial time. Linear tree-to-word transducers
are non-copying but not necessarily order-preserving and can be used to express
XML and other document transformations. The result is based on a partial normal
form that provides a basic characterization of the languages produced by linear
tree-to-word transducers.Comment: short version of this paper will be published in the proceedings of
the 20th Conference on Developments in Language Theory (DLT 2016), Montreal,
Canad
On external presentations of infinite graphs
The vertices of a finite state system are usually a subset of the natural
numbers. Most algorithms relative to these systems only use this fact to select
vertices.
For infinite state systems, however, the situation is different: in
particular, for such systems having a finite description, each state of the
system is a configuration of some machine. Then most algorithmic approaches
rely on the structure of these configurations. Such characterisations are said
internal. In order to apply algorithms detecting a structural property (like
identifying connected components) one may have first to transform the system in
order to fit the description needed for the algorithm. The problem of internal
characterisation is that it hides structural properties, and each solution
becomes ad hoc relatively to the form of the configurations.
On the contrary, external characterisations avoid explicit naming of the
vertices. Such characterisation are mostly defined via graph transformations.
In this paper we present two kind of external characterisations:
deterministic graph rewriting, which in turn characterise regular graphs,
deterministic context-free languages, and rational graphs. Inverse substitution
from a generator (like the complete binary tree) provides characterisation for
prefix-recognizable graphs, the Caucal Hierarchy and rational graphs. We
illustrate how these characterisation provide an efficient tool for the
representation of infinite state systems
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
Two-Way Visibly Pushdown Automata and Transducers
Automata-logic connections are pillars of the theory of regular languages.
Such connections are harder to obtain for transducers, but important results
have been obtained recently for word-to-word transformations, showing that the
three following models are equivalent: deterministic two-way transducers,
monadic second-order (MSO) transducers, and deterministic one-way automata
equipped with a finite number of registers. Nested words are words with a
nesting structure, allowing to model unranked trees as their depth-first-search
linearisations. In this paper, we consider transformations from nested words to
words, allowing in particular to produce unranked trees if output words have a
nesting structure. The model of visibly pushdown transducers allows to describe
such transformations, and we propose a simple deterministic extension of this
model with two-way moves that has the following properties: i) it is a simple
computational model, that naturally has a good evaluation complexity; ii) it is
expressive: it subsumes nested word-to-word MSO transducers, and the exact
expressiveness of MSO transducers is recovered using a simple syntactic
restriction; iii) it has good algorithmic/closure properties: the model is
closed under composition with a unambiguous one-way letter-to-letter transducer
which gives closure under regular look-around, and has a decidable equivalence
problem
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
Automata Minimization: a Functorial Approach
In this paper we regard languages and their acceptors - such as deterministic
or weighted automata, transducers, or monoids - as functors from input
categories that specify the type of the languages and of the machines to
categories that specify the type of outputs. Our results are as follows:
A) We provide sufficient conditions on the output category so that
minimization of the corresponding automata is guaranteed.
B) We show how to lift adjunctions between the categories for output values
to adjunctions between categories of automata.
C) We show how this framework can be instantiated to unify several phenomena
in automata theory, starting with determinization, minimization and syntactic
algebras. We provide explanations of Choffrut's minimization algorithm for
subsequential transducers and of Brzozowski's minimization algorithm in this
setting.Comment: journal version of the CALCO 2017 paper arXiv:1711.0306
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