Weighted Logics for Nested Words and Algebraic Formal Power Series

Nested words, a model for recursive programs proposed by Alur and Madhusudan, have recently gained much interest. In this paper we introduce quantitative extensions and study nested word series which assign to nested words elements of a semiring. We show that regular nested word series coincide with series definable in weighted logics as introduced by Droste and Gastin. For this we establish a connection between nested words and the free bisemigroup. Applying our result, we obtain characterizations of algebraic formal power series in terms of weighted logics. This generalizes results of Lautemann, Schwentick and Therien on context-free languages

Weighted Automata and Monadic Second Order Logic

Let S be a commutative semiring. M. Droste and P. Gastin have introduced in 2005 weighted monadic second order logic WMSOL with weights in S. They use a syntactic fragment RMSOL of WMSOL to characterize word functions (power series) recognizable by weighted automata, where the semantics of quantifiers is used both as arithmetical operations and, in the boolean case, as quantification. Already in 2001, B. Courcelle, J.Makowsky and U. Rotics have introduced a formalism for graph parameters definable in Monadic Second order Logic, here called MSOLEVAL with values in a ring R. Their framework can be easily adapted to semirings S. This formalism clearly separates the logical part from the arithmetical part and also applies to word functions. In this paper we give two proofs that RMSOL and MSOLEVAL with values in S have the same expressive power over words. One proof shows directly that MSOLEVAL captures the functions recognizable by weighted automata. The other proof shows how to translate the formalisms from one into the other.Comment: In Proceedings GandALF 2013, arXiv:1307.416

Survey : Weighted extended top-down tree transducers part I. : basics and expressive power

Weighted extended top-down tree transducers (transducteurs généralisés descendants [Arnold, Dauchet: Bi-transductions de forêts. ICALP'76. Edinburgh University Press, 1976]) received renewed interest in the field of Natural Language Processing, where they are used in syntax-based machine translation. This survey presents the foundations for a theoretical analysis of weighted extended top-down tree transducers. In particular, it discusses essentially complete semirings, which are a novel concept that can be used to lift incomparability results from the unweighted case to the weighted case even in the presence of infinite sums. In addition, several equivalent ways to define weighted extended top-down tree transducers are presented and the individual benefits of each presentation is shown on a small result

Definable transductions and weighted logics for texts

AbstractA text is a word together with an additional linear order on it. We study quantitative models for texts, i.e. text series which assign to texts elements of a semiring. We introduce an algebraic notion of recognizability following Reutenauer and Bozapalidis as well as weighted automata for texts combining an automaton model of Lodaya and Weil with a model of Ésik and Németh. After that we show that both formalisms describe the text series definable in a certain fragment of weighted logics as introduced by Droste and Gastin. In order to do so, we study certain definable transductions and show that they are compatible with weighted logics

Statistical language models within the algebra of weighted rational languages

Statistical language models are an important tool in natural language processing. They represent prior knowledge about a certain language which is usually gained from a set of samples called a corpus. In this paper, we present a novel way of creating N-gram language models using weighted finite automata. The construction of these models is formalised within the algebra underlying weighted finite automata and expressed in terms of weighted rational languages and transductions. Besides the algebra we make use of five special constant weighted transductions which rely only on the alphabet and the model parameter N. In addition, we discuss efficient implementations of these transductions in terms of virtual constructions