Formal Properties of XML Grammars and Languages

XML documents are described by a document type definition (DTD). An XML-grammar is a formal grammar that captures the syntactic features of a DTD. We investigate properties of this family of grammars. We show that every XML-language basically has a unique XML-grammar. We give two characterizations of languages generated by XML-grammars, one is set-theoretic, the other is by a kind of saturation property. We investigate decidability problems and prove that some properties that are undecidable for general context-free languages become decidable for XML-languages. We also characterize those XML-grammars that generate regular XML-languages.Comment: 24 page

Coding rotations on intervals

We show that the coding of rotation by $\alpha$ on $m$ intervals with rationally independent lengths can be recoded over $m$ Sturmian words of angle $\alpha.$ More precisely, for a given $m$ an universal automaton is constructed such that the edge indexed by the vector of values of the $i$th letter on each Sturmian word gives the value of the $i$th letter of the coding of rotation.Comment: LIAFA repor

Splicing systems and the Chomsky hierarchy

In this paper, we prove decidability properties and new results on the position of the family of languages generated by (circular) splicing systems within the Chomsky hierarchy. The two main results of the paper are the following. First, we show that it is decidable, given a circular splicing language and a regular language, whether they are equal. Second, we prove the language generated by an alphabetic splicing system is context-free. Alphabetic splicing systems are a generalization of simple and semi-simple splicin systems already considered in the literature

Sur la construction de mots sans carré

http://www-igm.univ-mlv.fr/~berstel/Articles/1979SeminaireBordeaux.pdfSéminaire de Théorie des Nombres 1978-1979. Exp. No. 18On montre que les quatre constructions de Thue, Morse-Hedlund, Braunholtz et Istrail définissent le même mot infini sans carré. On étudie alors leur lien avec les tag-systèmes. Enfin, on prouve que l'ensembel des mots infinis sans carré sur un alphabet à trois lettres n'est pas dénombrable

Operations preserving recognizable languages

Given a strictly increasing sequence s of non-negative integers, filtering a word a_0a_1 ... a_n by s consists in deleting the letters ai such that i is not in the set {s_0, s_1, ...}. By a natural generalization, denote by L[s], where L is a language, the set of all words of L filtered by s. The filtering problem is to characterize the filters s such that, for every regular language L, L[s] is regular. In this paper, the filtering problem is solved, and a unified approach is provided to solve similar questions, including the removal problem considered by Seiferas and McNaughton. Our approach relies on a detailed study of various residual notions, notably residually ultimately periodic sequences and residually rational transductions

The complexity of tangent words

In a previous paper, we described the set of words that appear in the coding of smooth (resp. analytic) curves at arbitrary small scale. The aim of this paper is to compute the complexity of those languages.Comment: In Proceedings WORDS 2011, arXiv:1108.341

Recurrent Partial Words

Partial words are sequences over a finite alphabet that may contain wildcard symbols, called holes, which match or are compatible with all letters; partial words without holes are said to be full words (or simply words). Given an infinite partial word w, the number of distinct full words over the alphabet that are compatible with factors of w of length n, called subwords of w, refers to a measure of complexity of infinite partial words so-called subword complexity. This measure is of particular interest because we can construct partial words with subword complexities not achievable by full words. In this paper, we consider the notion of recurrence over infinite partial words, that is, we study whether all of the finite subwords of a given infinite partial word appear infinitely often, and we establish connections between subword complexity and recurrence in this more general framework.Comment: In Proceedings WORDS 2011, arXiv:1108.341