Deciding Regularity of Hairpin Completions of Regular Languages in Polynomial Time

The hairpin completion is an operation on formal languages that has been inspired by the hairpin formation in DNA biochemistry and by DNA computing. In this paper we investigate the hairpin completion of regular languages. It is well known that hairpin completions of regular languages are linear context-free and not necessarily regular. As regularity of a (linear) context-free language is not decidable, the question arose whether regularity of a hairpin completion of regular languages is decidable. We prove that this problem is decidable and we provide a polynomial time algorithm. Furthermore, we prove that the hairpin completion of regular languages is an unambiguous linear context-free language and, as such, it has an effectively computable growth function. Moreover, we show that the growth of the hairpin completion is exponential if and only if the growth of the underlying languages is exponential and, in case the hairpin completion is regular, then the hairpin completion and the underlying languages have the same growth indicator

Dissecting Power of a Finite Intersection of Context Free Languages

Let $\exp^{k,\alpha}$ denote a tetration function defined as follows: $\exp^{1,\alpha}=2^{\alpha}$ and $\exp^{k+1,\alpha}=2^{\exp^{k,\alpha}}$, where $k,\alpha$ are positive integers. Let $\Delta_n$ denote an alphabet with $n$ letters. If $L\subseteq\Delta_n^*$ is an infinite language such that for each $u\in L$ there is $v\in L$ with $\vert u\vert<\vert v\vert\leq \exp^{k,\alpha}\vert u\vert$ then we call $L$ a language with the \emph{growth bounded by} $(k,\alpha)$-tetration. Given two infinite languages $L_1,L_2\in \Delta_n^*$, we say that $L_1$ \emph{dissects} $L_2$ if $\vert L_1\cap L_2\vert=\infty$ and $\vert(\Delta_n^*\setminus L_1)\cap L_2\vert=\infty$. Given a context free language $L$, let $\kappa(L)$ denote the size of the smallest context free grammar $G$ that generates $L$. We define the size of a grammar to be the total number of symbols on the right sides of all production rules. Given positive integers $n,k$ with $k\geq 2$, we show that there are context free languages $L_1,L_2,\dots, L_{3k-3}\subseteq \Delta^*_n$ with $\kappa(L_i)\leq 40 k$ such that if $\alpha$ is a positive integer and $L\subseteq\Delta_n^*$ is an infinite language with the growth bounded by $(k,\alpha)$-tetration then there is a regular language $M$ such that $M\cap\left(\bigcap_{i=1}^{3k-3}L_i\right)$ dissects $L$ and the minimal deterministic finite automaton accepting $M$ has at most $k+\alpha+3$ states

Computation of moments for probabilistic finite-state automata

[EN] The computation of moments of probabilistic finite-state automata (PFA) is researched in this article. First, the computation of moments of the length of the paths is introduced for general PFA, and then, the computation of moments of the number of times that a symbol appears in the strings generated by the PFA is described. These computations require a matrix inversion. Acyclic PFA, such as word graphs, are quite common in many practical applications. Algorithms for the efficient computation of the moments for acyclic PFA are also presented in this paper.This work has been partially supported by the Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnologia under the grant TIN2017-91452-EXP (IBEM), by the Generalitat Valenciana under the grant PROMETE0/2019/121 (DeepPattern), and by the grant "Ayudas Fundacion BBVA a equipos de investigacion cientifica 2018" (PR[8]_HUM_C2_0087).Sánchez Peiró, JA.; Romero, V. (2020). Computation of moments for probabilistic finite-state automata. Information Sciences. 516:388-400. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ins.2019.12.052S388400516Sakakibara, Y., Brown, M., Hughey, R., Mian, I. S., Sjölander, K., Underwood, R. C., & Haussler, D. (1994). Stochastic context-free grammers for tRNA modeling. Nucleic Acids Research, 22(23), 5112-5120. doi:10.1093/nar/22.23.5112Álvaro, F., Sánchez, J.-A., & Benedí, J.-M. (2016). An integrated grammar-based approach for mathematical expression recognition. Pattern Recognition, 51, 135-147. doi:10.1016/j.patcog.2015.09.013Mohri, M., Pereira, F., & Riley, M. (2002). Weighted finite-state transducers in speech recognition. Computer Speech & Language, 16(1), 69-88. doi:10.1006/csla.2001.0184Casacuberta, F., & Vidal, E. (2004). Machine Translation with Inferred Stochastic Finite-State Transducers. Computational Linguistics, 30(2), 205-225. doi:10.1162/089120104323093294Ortmanns, S., Ney, H., & Aubert, X. (1997). A word graph algorithm for large vocabulary continuous speech recognition. Computer Speech & Language, 11(1), 43-72. doi:10.1006/csla.1996.0022Soule, S. (1974). Entropies of probabilistic grammars. Information and Control, 25(1), 57-74. doi:10.1016/s0019-9958(74)90799-2Justesen, J., & Larsen, K. J. (1975). On probabilistic context-free grammars that achieve capacity. Information and Control, 29(3), 268-285. doi:10.1016/s0019-9958(75)90437-4Hernando, D., Crespi, V., & Cybenko, G. (2005). Efficient Computation of the Hidden Markov Model Entropy for a Given Observation Sequence. IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, 51(7), 2681-2685. doi:10.1109/tit.2005.850223Nederhof, M.-J., & Satta, G. (2008). Computation of distances for regular and context-free probabilistic languages. Theoretical Computer Science, 395(2-3), 235-254. doi:10.1016/j.tcs.2008.01.010CORTES, C., MOHRI, M., RASTOGI, A., & RILEY, M. (2008). ON THE COMPUTATION OF THE RELATIVE ENTROPY OF PROBABILISTIC AUTOMATA. International Journal of Foundations of Computer Science, 19(01), 219-242. doi:10.1142/s0129054108005644Ilic, V. M., Stankovi, M. S., & Todorovic, B. T. (2011). Entropy Message Passing. IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, 57(1), 375-380. doi:10.1109/tit.2010.2090235Booth, T. L., & Thompson, R. A. (1973). Applying Probability Measures to Abstract Languages. IEEE Transactions on Computers, C-22(5), 442-450. doi:10.1109/t-c.1973.223746Thompson, R. A. (1974). Determination of Probabilistic Grammars for Functionally Specified Probability-Measure Languages. IEEE Transactions on Computers, C-23(6), 603-614. doi:10.1109/t-c.1974.224001Wetherell, C. S. (1980). Probabilistic Languages: A Review and Some Open Questions. ACM Computing Surveys, 12(4), 361-379. doi:10.1145/356827.356829Sanchez, J.-A., & Benedi, J.-M. (1997). Consistency of stochastic context-free grammars from probabilistic estimation based on growth transformations. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 19(9), 1052-1055. doi:10.1109/34.615455Hutchins, S. E. (1972). Moments of string and derivation lengths of stochastic context-free grammars. Information Sciences, 4(2), 179-191. doi:10.1016/0020-0255(72)90011-4Heim, A., Sidorenko, V., & Sorger, U. (2008). Computation of distributions and their moments in the trellis. Advances in Mathematics of Communications, 2(4), 373-391. doi:10.3934/amc.2008.2.373Vidal, E., Thollard, F., de la Higuera, C., Casacuberta, F., & Carrasco, R. C. (2005). Probabilistic finite-state machines - part I. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 27(7), 1013-1025. doi:10.1109/tpami.2005.147Sánchez, J. A., Rocha, M. A., Romero, V., & Villegas, M. (2018). On the Derivational Entropy of Left-to-Right Probabilistic Finite-State Automata and Hidden Markov Models. Computational Linguistics, 44(1), 17-37. doi:10.1162/coli_a_0030

Groups and semigroups with a one-counter word problem

We prove that a finitely generated semigroup whose word problem is a one-counter language has a linear growth function. This provides us with a very strong restriction on the structure of such a semigroup, which, in particular, yields an elementary proof of a result of Herbst, that a group with a one-counter word problem is virtually cyclic. We prove also that the word problem of a group is an intersection of finitely many one-counter languages if and only if the group is virtually abelian