5,399 research outputs found
Automata with Nested Pebbles Capture First-Order Logic with Transitive Closure
String languages recognizable in (deterministic) log-space are characterized
either by two-way (deterministic) multi-head automata, or following Immerman,
by first-order logic with (deterministic) transitive closure. Here we elaborate
this result, and match the number of heads to the arity of the transitive
closure. More precisely, first-order logic with k-ary deterministic transitive
closure has the same power as deterministic automata walking on their input
with k heads, additionally using a finite set of nested pebbles. This result is
valid for strings, ordered trees, and in general for families of graphs having
a fixed automaton that can be used to traverse the nodes of each of the graphs
in the family. Other examples of such families are grids, toruses, and
rectangular mazes. For nondeterministic automata, the logic is restricted to
positive occurrences of transitive closure.
The special case of k=1 for trees, shows that single-head deterministic
tree-walking automata with nested pebbles are characterized by first-order
logic with unary deterministic transitive closure. This refines our earlier
result that placed these automata between first-order and monadic second-order
logic on trees.Comment: Paper for Logical Methods in Computer Science, 27 pages, 1 figur
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
Advances and applications of automata on words and trees : executive summary
Seminar: 10501 - Advances and Applications of Automata on Words and Trees. The aim of the seminar was to discuss and systematize the recent fast progress in automata theory and to identify important directions for future research. For this, the seminar brought together more than 40 researchers from automata theory and related fields of applications. We had 19 talks of 30 minutes and 5 one-hour lectures leaving ample room for discussions. In the following we describe the topics in more detail
Linear Bounded Composition of Tree-Walking Tree Transducers: Linear Size Increase and Complexity
Compositions of tree-walking tree transducers form a hierarchy with respect
to the number of transducers in the composition. As main technical result it is
proved that any such composition can be realized as a linear bounded
composition, which means that the sizes of the intermediate results can be
chosen to be at most linear in the size of the output tree. This has
consequences for the expressiveness and complexity of the translations in the
hierarchy. First, if the computed translation is a function of linear size
increase, i.e., the size of the output tree is at most linear in the size of
the input tree, then it can be realized by just one, deterministic,
tree-walking tree transducer. For compositions of deterministic transducers it
is decidable whether or not the translation is of linear size increase. Second,
every composition of deterministic transducers can be computed in deterministic
linear time on a RAM and in deterministic linear space on a Turing machine,
measured in the sum of the sizes of the input and output tree. Similarly, every
composition of nondeterministic transducers can be computed in simultaneous
polynomial time and linear space on a nondeterministic Turing machine. Their
output tree languages are deterministic context-sensitive, i.e., can be
recognized in deterministic linear space on a Turing machine. The membership
problem for compositions of nondeterministic translations is nondeterministic
polynomial time and deterministic linear space. The membership problem for the
composition of a nondeterministic and a deterministic tree-walking tree
translation (for a nondeterministic IO macro tree translation) is log-space
reducible to a context-free language, whereas the membership problem for the
composition of a deterministic and a nondeterministic tree-walking tree
translation (for a nondeterministic OI macro tree translation) is possibly
NP-complete
Three hierarchies of transducers
Composition of top-down tree transducers yields a proper hierarchy of transductions and of output languages. The same is true for ETOL systems (viewed as transducers) and for two-way generalized sequential machines
Tree transducers, L systems, and two-way machines
A relationship between parallel rewriting systems and two-way machines is investigated. Restrictions on the “copying power” of these devices endow them with rich structuring and give insight into the issues of determinism, parallelism, and copying. Among the parallel rewriting systems considered are the top-down tree transducer; the generalized syntax-directed translation scheme and the ETOL system, and among the two-way machines are the tree-walking automaton, the two-way finite-state transducer, and (generalizations of) the one-way checking stack automaton. The. relationship of these devices to macro grammars is also considered. An effort is made .to provide a systematic survey of a number of existing results
Reachability in Higher-Order-Counters
Higher-order counter automata (\HOCS) can be either seen as a restriction of
higher-order pushdown automata (\HOPS) to a unary stack alphabet, or as an
extension of counter automata to higher levels. We distinguish two principal
kinds of \HOCS: those that can test whether the topmost counter value is zero
and those which cannot.
We show that control-state reachability for level \HOCS with -test is
complete for \mbox{}-fold exponential space; leaving out the -test
leads to completeness for \mbox{}-fold exponential time. Restricting
\HOCS (without -test) to level , we prove that global (forward or
backward) reachability analysis is \PTIME-complete. This enhances the known
result for pushdown systems which are subsumed by level \HOCS without
-test.
We transfer our results to the formal language setting. Assuming that \PTIME
\subsetneq \PSPACE \subsetneq \mathbf{EXPTIME}, we apply proof ideas of
Engelfriet and conclude that the hierarchies of languages of \HOPS and of \HOCS
form strictly interleaving hierarchies. Interestingly, Engelfriet's
constructions also allow to conclude immediately that the hierarchy of
collapsible pushdown languages is strict level-by-level due to the existing
complexity results for reachability on collapsible pushdown graphs. This
answers an open question independently asked by Parys and by Kobayashi.Comment: Version with Full Proofs of a paper that appears at MFCS 201
Alternating register automata on finite words and trees
We study alternating register automata on data words and data trees in
relation to logics. A data word (resp. data tree) is a word (resp. tree) whose
every position carries a label from a finite alphabet and a data value from an
infinite domain. We investigate one-way automata with alternating control over
data words or trees, with one register for storing data and comparing them for
equality. This is a continuation of the study started by Demri, Lazic and
Jurdzinski. From the standpoint of register automata models, this work aims at
two objectives: (1) simplifying the existent decidability proofs for the
emptiness problem for alternating register automata; and (2) exhibiting
decidable extensions for these models. From the logical perspective, we show
that (a) in the case of data words, satisfiability of LTL with one register and
quantification over data values is decidable; and (b) the satisfiability
problem for the so-called forward fragment of XPath on XML documents is
decidable, even in the presence of DTDs and even of key constraints. The
decidability is obtained through a reduction to the automata model introduced.
This fragment contains the child, descendant, next-sibling and
following-sibling axes, as well as data equality and inequality tests
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