Detecting Similarity of Rational Plane Curves

A novel and deterministic algorithm is presented to detect whether two given rational plane curves are related by means of a similarity, which is a central question in Pattern Recognition. As a by-product it finds all such similarities, and the particular case of equal curves yields all symmetries. A complete theoretical description of the method is provided, and the method has been implemented and tested in the Sage system for curves of moderate degrees.Comment: 22 page

Non-simplifying Graph Rewriting Termination

So far, a very large amount of work in Natural Language Processing (NLP) rely on trees as the core mathematical structure to represent linguistic informations (e.g. in Chomsky's work). However, some linguistic phenomena do not cope properly with trees. In a former paper, we showed the benefit of encoding linguistic structures by graphs and of using graph rewriting rules to compute on those structures. Justified by some linguistic considerations, graph rewriting is characterized by two features: first, there is no node creation along computations and second, there are non-local edge modifications. Under these hypotheses, we show that uniform termination is undecidable and that non-uniform termination is decidable. We describe two termination techniques based on weights and we give complexity bound on the derivation length for these rewriting system.Comment: In Proceedings TERMGRAPH 2013, arXiv:1302.599

Computational Aspects of the Hausdorff Distance in Unbounded Dimension

We study the computational complexity of determining the Hausdorff distance of two polytopes given in halfspace- or vertex-presentation in arbitrary dimension. Subsequently, a matching problem is investigated where a convex body is allowed to be homothetically transformed in order to minimize its Hausdorff distance to another one. For this problem, we characterize optimal solutions, deduce a Helly-type theorem and give polynomial time (approximation) algorithms for polytopes