115,976 research outputs found
Decision problems for Clark-congruential languages
A common question when studying a class of context-free grammars is whether
equivalence is decidable within this class. We answer this question positively
for the class of Clark-congruential grammars, which are of interest to
grammatical inference. We also consider the problem of checking whether a given
CFG is Clark-congruential, and show that it is decidable given that the CFG is
a DCFG.Comment: Version 2 incorporates revisions prompted by the comments of
anonymous referees at ICGI and LearnAu
Synchronous Subsequentiality and Approximations to Undecidable Problems
We introduce the class of synchronous subsequential relations, a subclass of
the synchronous relations which embodies some properties of subsequential
relations. If we take relations of this class as forming the possible
transitions of an infinite automaton, then most decision problems (apart from
membership) still remain undecidable (as they are for synchronous and
subsequential rational relations), but on the positive side, they can be
approximated in a meaningful way we make precise in this paper. This might make
the class useful for some applications, and might serve to establish an
intermediate position in the trade-off between issues of expressivity and
(un)decidability.Comment: In Proceedings GandALF 2015, arXiv:1509.0685
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
Node Labels in Local Decision
The role of unique node identifiers in network computing is well understood
as far as symmetry breaking is concerned. However, the unique identifiers also
leak information about the computing environment - in particular, they provide
some nodes with information related to the size of the network. It was recently
proved that in the context of local decision, there are some decision problems
such that (1) they cannot be solved without unique identifiers, and (2) unique
node identifiers leak a sufficient amount of information such that the problem
becomes solvable (PODC 2013).
In this work we give study what is the minimal amount of information that we
need to leak from the environment to the nodes in order to solve local decision
problems. Our key results are related to scalar oracles that, for any given
, provide a multiset of labels; then the adversary assigns the
labels to the nodes in the network. This is a direct generalisation of the
usual assumption of unique node identifiers. We give a complete
characterisation of the weakest oracle that leaks at least as much information
as the unique identifiers.
Our main result is the following dichotomy: we classify scalar oracles as
large and small, depending on their asymptotic behaviour, and show that (1) any
large oracle is at least as powerful as the unique identifiers in the context
of local decision problems, while (2) for any small oracle there are local
decision problems that still benefit from unique identifiers.Comment: Conference version to appear in the proceedings of SIROCCO 201
Continuity of Functional Transducers: A Profinite Study of Rational Functions
A word-to-word function is continuous for a class of languages~
if its inverse maps _languages to~. This notion
provides a basis for an algebraic study of transducers, and was integral to the
characterization of the sequential transducers computable in some circuit
complexity classes.
Here, we report on the decidability of continuity for functional transducers
and some standard classes of regular languages. To this end, we develop a
robust theory rooted in the standard profinite analysis of regular languages.
Since previous algebraic studies of transducers have focused on the sole
structure of the underlying input automaton, we also compare the two algebraic
approaches. We focus on two questions: When are the automaton structure and the
continuity properties related, and when does continuity propagate to
superclasses
Decision Problems for Deterministic Pushdown Automata on Infinite Words
The article surveys some decidability results for DPDAs on infinite words
(omega-DPDA). We summarize some recent results on the decidability of the
regularity and the equivalence problem for the class of weak omega-DPDAs.
Furthermore, we present some new results on the parity index problem for
omega-DPDAs. For the specification of a parity condition, the states of the
omega-DPDA are assigned priorities (natural numbers), and a run is accepting if
the highest priority that appears infinitely often during a run is even. The
basic simplification question asks whether one can determine the minimal number
of priorities that are needed to accept the language of a given omega-DPDA. We
provide some decidability results on variations of this question for some
classes of omega-DPDAs.Comment: In Proceedings AFL 2014, arXiv:1405.527
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