85,205 research outputs found
The FC-rank of a context-free language
We prove that the finite condensation rank (FC-rank) of the lexicographic
ordering of a context-free language is strictly less than
A Characterization for Decidable Separability by Piecewise Testable Languages
The separability problem for word languages of a class by
languages of a class asks, for two given languages and
from , whether there exists a language from that
includes and excludes , that is, and . In this work, we assume some mild closure properties for
and study for which such classes separability by a piecewise
testable language (PTL) is decidable. We characterize these classes in terms of
decidability of (two variants of) an unboundedness problem. From this, we
deduce that separability by PTL is decidable for a number of language classes,
such as the context-free languages and languages of labeled vector addition
systems. Furthermore, it follows that separability by PTL is decidable if and
only if one can compute for any language of the class its downward closure wrt.
the scattered substring ordering (i.e., if the set of scattered substrings of
any language of the class is effectively regular).
The obtained decidability results contrast some undecidability results. In
fact, for all (non-regular) language classes that we present as examples with
decidable separability, it is undecidable whether a given language is a PTL
itself.
Our characterization involves a result of independent interest, which states
that for any kind of languages and , non-separability by PTL is
equivalent to the existence of common patterns in and
Descriptional Complexity of Three-Nonterminal Scattered Context Grammars: An Improvement
Recently, it has been shown that every recursively enumerable language can be
generated by a scattered context grammar with no more than three nonterminals.
However, in that construction, the maximal number of nonterminals
simultaneously rewritten during a derivation step depends on many factors, such
as the cardinality of the alphabet of the generated language and the structure
of the generated language itself. This paper improves the result by showing
that the maximal number of nonterminals simultaneously rewritten during any
derivation step can be limited by a small constant regardless of other factors
An approach to computing downward closures
The downward closure of a word language is the set of all (not necessarily
contiguous) subwords of its members. It is well-known that the downward closure
of any language is regular. While the downward closure appears to be a powerful
abstraction, algorithms for computing a finite automaton for the downward
closure of a given language have been established only for few language
classes.
This work presents a simple general method for computing downward closures.
For language classes that are closed under rational transductions, it is shown
that the computation of downward closures can be reduced to checking a certain
unboundedness property.
This result is used to prove that downward closures are computable for (i)
every language class with effectively semilinear Parikh images that are closed
under rational transductions, (ii) matrix languages, and (iii) indexed
languages (equivalently, languages accepted by higher-order pushdown automata
of order 2).Comment: Full version of contribution to ICALP 2015. Comments welcom
Isomorphisms of scattered automatic linear orders
We prove that the isomorphism of scattered tree automatic linear orders as
well as the existence of automorphisms of scattered word automatic linear
orders are undecidable. For the existence of automatic automorphisms of word
automatic linear orders, we determine the exact level of undecidability in the
arithmetical hierarchy
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