Series which are both max-plus and min-plus rational are unambiguous

Consider partial maps from the free monoid into the field of real numbers with a rational domain. We show that two families of such series are actually the same: the unambiguous rational series on the one hand, and the max-plus and min-plus rational series on the other hand. The decidability of equality was known to hold in both families with different proofs, so the above unifies the picture. We give an effective procedure to build an unambiguous automaton from a max-plus automaton and a min-plus one that recognize the same series

On Functionality of Visibly Pushdown Transducers

Visibly pushdown transducers form a subclass of pushdown transducers that (strictly) extends finite state transducers with a stack. Like visibly pushdown automata, the input symbols determine the stack operations. In this paper, we prove that functionality is decidable in PSpace for visibly pushdown transducers. The proof is done via a pumping argument: if a word with two outputs has a sufficiently large nesting depth, there exists a nested word with two outputs whose nesting depth is strictly smaller. The proof uses technics of word combinatorics. As a consequence of decidability of functionality, we also show that equivalence of functional visibly pushdown transducers is Exptime-Complete.Comment: 20 page

The many facets of string transducers

Regular word transductions extend the robust notion of regular languages from a qualitative to a quantitative reasoning. They were already considered in early papers of formal language theory, but turned out to be much more challenging. The last decade brought considerable research around various transducer models, aiming to achieve similar robustness as for automata and languages. In this paper we survey some older and more recent results on string transducers. We present classical connections between automata, logic and algebra extended to transducers, some genuine definability questions, and review approaches to the equivalence problem

Extraction and recoding of input-ε-cycles in finite state transducers

AbstractMuch attention has been brought to determinization and ε-removal in previous work. This article describes an algorithm for extracting all ε-cycles, which are a particular type of non-determinism, from an arbitrary finite-state transducer (FST). The algorithm decomposes the FST, T, into two FSTs, T1 and T2, such that T1 contains no ε-cycles and T2 contains all ε-cycles of T. The article also proposes an alternative approach where each ε-cycle of T is replaced by a single transitions with a complex label that describes the output of the cycle. Since ε-cycles are an obstacle for some algorithms such as the decomposition of ambiguous FSTs, the proposed approaches allow us to by-pass this problem. ε-Cycles can be extracted or recoded before and re-inserted (by composition) after such algorithms

Modular Descriptions of Regular Functions

We discuss various formalisms to describe string-to-string transformations. Many are based on automata and can be seen as operational descriptions, allowing direct implementations when the input scanner is deterministic. Alternatively, one may use more human friendly descriptions based on some simple basic transformations (e.g., copy, duplicate, erase, reverse) and various combinators such as function composition or extensions of regular operations.Comment: preliminary version appeared in CAI 2019, LNCS 1154

Une application de la representation matricielle des transductions

RésuméOn étudie le problème suivant, fréquemment rencontré en théorie des langages: soient n langages L1,…,Ln reconnus par les monoïdes M1,…,Mn respectivement. Etant donné une opération ϕ, on cherche à construire un monoïde M, fonction de M1,…,Mn, qui reconnaisse le langage (L1,…,Ln)ϕ. Nous montrons que la plupart des constructions proposées dans la littérature pour ce type de problème sont en fait des cas particuliers d'une méthode générale que nous exposons ici. Cette méthode s'applique également à certains problèmes moins classiques relatifs par exemple à la réduction du groupe libre ou aux opérations de contrôle sur les T0L-systèmes.AbstractWe study the following classical problem of formal language theory: let L1,…,Ln be n languages recognized by the monoids M1,…,Mn respectively. Given an operation ϕ, we want to build a monoid M, function of M1,…,Mn, which recognizes the language (L1,…,Ln)ϕ. We show that most of the constructions given in the literature for this kind of problem are particular cases of a general method. This method can also be applied to some less classical problems related for example to the Dyck-reduction of the free-group or to control operations on T0L-systems

Finite Sequentiality of Unambiguous Max-Plus Tree Automata

We show the decidability of the finite sequentiality problem for unambiguous max-plus tree automata. A max-plus tree automaton is called unambiguous if there is at most one accepting run on every tree. The finite sequentiality problem asks whether for a given max-plus tree automaton, there exist finitely many deterministic max-plus tree automata whose pointwise maximum is equivalent to the given automaton

Coding partitions

Motivated by the study of decipherability conditions for codes weaker than Unique Decipherability (UD), we introduce the notion of coding partition. Such a notion generalizes that of UD code and, for codes that are not UD, allows to recover the ''unique decipherability" at the level of the classes of the partition. By tacking into account the natural order between the partitions, we define the characteristic partition of a code X as the finest coding partition of X. This leads to introduce the canonical decomposition of a code in at most one unambiguous component and other (if any) totally ambiguous components. In the case the code is finite, we give an algorithm for computing its canonical partition. This, in particular, allows to decide whether a given partition of a finite code X is a coding partition. This last problem is then approached in the case the code is a rational set. We prove its decidability under the hypothesis that the partition contains a finite number of classes and each class is a rational set. Moreover we conjecture that the canonical partition satisfies such a hypothesis. Finally we consider also some relationships between coding partitions and varieties of codes