Star-free languages and local divisors

A celebrated result of Schützenberger says that a language is star-free if and only if it is is recognized by a finite aperiodic monoid. We give a new proof for this theorem using local divisors. © 2014 Springer International Publishing

Testing Simon’s congruence

Piecewise testable languages are a subclass of the regular languages. There are many equivalent ways of defining them; Simon’s congruence ∼kis one of the most classical approaches. Two words are ∼k-equivalent if they have the same set of (scattered) subwords of length at most k. A language L is piecewise testable if there exists some k such that L is a union of ∼k-classes. For each equivalence class of ∼k, one can define a canonical representative in shortlex normal form, that is, the minimal word with respect to the lexicographic order among the shortest words in ∼k. We present an algorithm for computing the canonical representative of the ∼k-class of a given word w ∈ A∗of length n. The running time of our algorithm is in O(|A|n) even if k ≤ n is part of the input. This is surprising since the number of possible subwords grows exponentially in k. The case k > n is not interesting since then, the equivalence class of w is a singleton. If the alphabet is fixed, the running time of our algorithm is linear in the size of the input word. Moreover, for fixed alphabet, we show that the computation of shortlex normal forms for ∼kis possible in deterministic logarithmic space. One of the consequences of our algorithm is that one can check with the same complexity whether two words are ∼k-equivalent (with k being part of the input)

A survey on the local divisor technique

© 2015 Elsevier B.V. Local divisors allow a powerful induction scheme on the size of a monoid. We survey this technique by giving several examples of this proof method. These applications include linear temporal logic, rational expressions with Kleene stars restricted to prefix codes with bounded synchronization delay, Church-Rosser congruential languages, and Simon's Factorization Forest Theorem. We also introduce the notion of a localizable language class as a new abstract concept which unifies some of the proofs for the results above

Green’s relations in deterministic finite automata

Green’s relations are a fundamental tool in the structure theory of semigroups. They can be defined by reachability in the (right/left/twosided) Cayley graph. The equivalence classes of Green’s relations then correspond to the strongly connected components. We study the complexity of Green’s relations in semigroups generated by transformations on a finite set. We show that, in the worst case, the number of equivalence classes is in the same order of magnitude as the number of elements. Another important parameter is the maximal length of a chain of strongly connected components. Our main contribution is an exponential lower bound for this parameter. There is a simple construction for an arbitrary set of generators. However, the proof for a constant size alphabet is rather involved. We also investigate the special cases of unary and binary alphabets. All these results are extended to deterministic finite automata and their syntactic semigroups

Omega-rational expressions with bounded synchronization delay

© 2013, Springer Science+Business Media New York. In 1965 Sch ̈utzenberger published his famous result that star-free languages (SF) and aperiodic languages (AP) coincide over finite words, often written as SF = AP. Perrin generalized SF = AP to infinite words in the mid 1980s. In 1973 Sch ̈utzenberger presented another (and less known) characteri- zation of aperiodic languages in terms of rational expressions where the use of the star operation is restricted to prefix codes with bounded synchronization delay and no complementation is used. We denote this class of languages by SD. In this paper, we present a generalization of SD = AP to infinite words. This became possible via a substantial simplification of the proof for the cor- responding result for finite words. Moreover, we show that SD = AP can be viewed as more fundamental than SF = AP in the sense that the classical 1965 result of Sch ̈utzenberger and its 1980s extension to infinite words by Perrin are immediate consequences of SD = AP

The word problem for omega-terms over the Trotter-Weil hierarchy [extended abstract]

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016. Over finitewords, there is a tight connection between the quantifier alternation hierarchy inside two-variable first-order logic FO 2 and a hierarchy of finite monoids: theTrotter-Weil Hierarchy. The variousways of climbing up this hierarchy include Mal’cev products, deterministic and codeterministic concatenation as well as identities of ω-terms.We show that the word problem for ω-terms over each level of the Trotter-Weil Hierarchy is decidable; this means, for every variety V of the hierarchy and every identity u = v of ω-terms, one can decide whether all monoids in V satisfy u = v. More precisely, for every fixed variety V, our approach yields nondeterministic logarithmic space (NL) and deterministic polynomial time algorithms, which are more efficient than straightforward translations of the NL-algorithms. From a language perspective, the word problem for ω- terms is the following: for every language variety V in theTrotter-Weil Hierarchy and every language varietyWgivenbyan identity of ω-terms, one can decide whether V ⊆ W. This includes the case where V is some level of the FO 2 quantifier alternation hierarchy. As an application of our results, we show that the separation problems for the so-called corners of the Trotter- Weil Hierarchy are decidable

On the index of Simon's congruence for piecewise testability

© 2014 Elsevier B.V. Simon's congruence, denoted by ∼ n , relates words having the same subwords of length up to n. We show that, over a k-letter alphabet, the number of words modulo ∼ n is in 2 Θ (n k-1 lognθ)

The half-levels of the FO2 alternation hierarchy

© 2016, Springer Science+Business Media New York. The alternation hierarchy in two-variable first-order logic FO 2 [ < ] over words was shown to be decidable by Kufleitner and Weil, and independently by Krebs and Straubing. We consider a similar hierarchy, reminiscent of the half levels of the dot-depth hierarchy or the Straubing-Thérien hierarchy. The fragment Σm2 of FO 2 is defined by disallowing universal quantifiers and having at most m−1 nested negations. The Boolean closure of Σm2 yields the m th level of the FO 2 -alternation hierarchy. We give an effective characterization of Σm2, i.e., for every integer m one can decide whether a given regular language is definable in Σm2. Among other techniques, the proof relies on an extension of block products to ordered monoids

Block products and nesting negations in FO2

The alternation hierarchy in two-variable first-order logic FO 2 [∈ < ∈] over words was recently shown to be decidable by Kufleitner and Weil, and independently by Krebs and Straubing. In this paper we consider a similar hierarchy, reminiscent of the half levels of the dot-depth hierarchy or the Straubing-Thérien hierarchy. The fragment of FO 2 is defined by disallowing universal quantifiers and having at most m∈-∈1 nested negations. One can view as the formulas in FO 2 which have at most m blocks of quantifiers on every path of their parse tree, and the first block is existential. Thus, the m th level of the FO 2 -alternation hierarchy is the Boolean closure of. We give an effective characterization of, i.e., for every integer m one can decide whether a given regular language is definable by a two-variable first-order formula with negation nesting depth at most m. More precisely, for every m we give ω-terms U m and V m such that an FO 2 -definable language is in if and only if its ordered syntactic monoid satisfies the identity U m ∈V m. Among other techniques, the proof relies on an extension of block products to ordered monoids. © 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland

Regular languages are Church-Rosser congruential

© 2015 ACM 0004-5411/2015/10-ART32 15.00. This article shows a general result about finite monoids and weight reducing string rewriting systems. As a consequence it proves a long standing conjecture in formal language theory: All regular languages are Church-Rosser congruential. The class of Church-Rosser congruential languages was introduced by McNaughton, Narendran, and Otto in 1988. A language L is Church-Rosser congruential if there exists a finite, confluent, and length-reducing semi-Thue system S such that L is a finite union of congruence classes modulo S. It was known that there are deterministic linear context-free languages which are not Church- Rosser congruential, but the conjecture was that all regular languages are of this form. The article offers a stronger statement: A language is regular if and only if it is strongly Church-Rosser congruential. It is the journal version of the conference abstract which was presented at ICALP 2012