Questions tagged [formal-languages]
The study of formal languages (sets of strings or trees over an alphabet), rewriting systems and algorithms, recognition automata/algorithms, and related questions.
158 questions
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The automorphism groups of smallest grammars of a language string are isomorphic
Let $s \in \Sigma^*$ be a formal language string. Consider the automorphism group of $s$, defined to be the set of all permutations of positions of $s$ that leave $s$ fixed. For instance $G(abab) = \...
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Name for a class of languages closed under union, inverse generalised sequential machine mappings and intersection with regular languages
I asked this question on the TCS stackexchange but have so far received no answer:
Is there a name for classes of languages closed under finite union, inverse generalised sequential machine mappings ...
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Formalizations of the idea that something is a function of something else?
I'll state my questions upfront and attempt to motivate/explain them afterwards.
Q1: Is there a direct way of expressing the relation "$y$ is a function of $x$" inside set theory?
More ...
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Is equality of formulas with floor rounding or integer division decidable?
As far as I know, formulae involving rationals and basic arithmetic ($+$, $-$, $\cdot$ and $/$) have decidable equality. Is this still the case if we add floor rounding (or integer division)?
Define ...
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Does the fixed point lemma / diagonalization require capturing or not?
Peter Smith's formulation of the diagonalization lemma is essentially as follows, from Theorem 47 of his (fantastic) online book:
If theory T extends Robinson Arithmetic, and P is an one-place open
...
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Status of an open problem about semilinear sets
In his book "The Mathematical Theory of Context-Free Languages" (1966), Ginsburg mentioned the following open problem:
Find a decision procedure for determining if an arbitrary semilinear set
is a ...
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Is it possible to construct a formal language that allows to refer to specific real numbers that encode ordinals accidentally writable by an ITTM?
Let $A$ denote a particular (fixed) algorithm to encode ordinals as real numbers. The exact technical description of $A$ is irrelevant for this question: it can be any algorithm that is mathematically ...
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Concatenation of strings [closed]
We have two strings (i. e., finite tuples) $A$ and $B$.
We have to find if for some positive integers $n$ and $m$, the string $A$ concatenated $n$ times equals the string $B$ concatenated $m$ times or ...
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Is there an unambiguous CFL whose complement is not context-free?
I'm doing a little bit of research about context-free languages. A question that's popped up is whether or not there exists an unambiguous context-free language whose complement is not a context-free ...
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Errors in Waksman's Solution to Cellular Automaton Firing Squad Problem?
Recently, a student and I have been working through Waksman's paper ``An Optimum Solution to the Firing Squad Synchronization Problem.'' The paper claims that for any value of $n$, the proposed ...
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For synchronizing eulerian finite state machines every proper subset of states has some larger state set leads to this subset
Suppose we have a deterministic complete finite automaton which is synchronized, meaning we have a reset word, i.e. a word which resets the automaton to a definite state, regardless from which state ...
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Transformation or correspondence between language and real number
As we know, formal language can be regarded as a set of strings of alphabet, and real number can be regarded as sequence generated by set of integers, for example, denominators of the simple continued ...
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Every infinite c.e.language is infinite or finite union of regular languages including at least one infinite regular language?
Is Every infinite c.e.language infinite or finite union of regular languages including at least one infinite regular language?
And is every infinite c.e.language that is not indexed language(that may ...
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What does homomorphism between languages mean to the correspoding Turing Machines?
According to the article: every c.e.language over $\Sigma^*$can be formed by homomorphism from a Dyck language over $\Sigma^{'}$ intersection with a minimal linear language over $\Sigma^{'}$ to the ...
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Alternative notation for Kleene star
I am writing a paper which use two different operations on sets of works $X$, both of which I want to denote by a star, $X^{\ast}$. One of these operations is the Kleene star, and for whatever reason ...
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Regular languages and the pumping lemma
Let's say that I want to prove that a language is not regular.
The only general technique I know for doing this is the so-called "pumping lemma", which says that if $L$ is a regular language, then ...
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Finite variation and idempotent languages and automata
Let $L$ be a regular language over alphabet $\Sigma$ and let $A:=(Q,\Sigma,\delta, q_0, F)$ be the minimal DFA recognizing $L$. For every $w\in \Sigma^*$ define the variation of $w$ w.r.t. $L$ by
$$\...
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Can ETCC/ETCS talk about 'size issues'?
In material set theories (like ZFC), one can prove that there is no set of all sets. Can one prove a similar statement in ETCS? This exact statement "there is no set x such that y in x for every set y"...
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What exactly is a judgement?
Before formulating my question, let me briefly sum up what I know about the topic (feel free to correct me if something I claimed is false!). This is for you good to see what my state of knowledge is, ...
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Complementation of $\omega$-regular languages in reverse mathematics
Does anyone know where Büchi's theorem that $\omega$-regular languages are closed under complementation fits into the reverse-mathematics classification scheme? That is, is it equivalent over $\...
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Neighbourhood of a word and Levenshtein distance
The Levenshtein distance or Edit distance $$ lev(U,V) $$ between two strings $U$ and $V$ over a finite alphabet $\Sigma$ of size $ \left| \Sigma \right| = \sigma ,$ is the minimal number of insertions,...
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What do we call this quantifier ("binder")?
There's a quantifier ("binder", whatever), call it $\alpha$, defined as follows: $\alpha x.\tau$ is the (usually infinite) expression obtained by applying the substitution $\{x \mapsto \tau\}$ to the ...
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Coherence and rewriting
In category theory there are numerous coherence theorems (https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/coherence+theorem). One example is the Mac Lane's coherence theorem for monoidal categories. This and probably ...
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Computing the ordinal of a rational language well-partially-ordered by the subword relation
Let $\Sigma$ be a finite set or "alphabet", $\Sigma^*$ the free monoid on $\Sigma$ or set of "words". If $w,w'\in \Sigma^*$, write $w\leq w'$ when $w$ is a "subword" of $w'$, i.e., can be obtained by ...
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How to get $\omega$-regular expression from buchi automaton
Is there an algorithm or a trick on how to get $\omega$-regular expressions from Buchi automatons? If yes, is there also some way to do create minimal such regular expressions?
It is extremely ...
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Deterministic Finite Automata question [closed]
I am very new to finite automata, and I came across an issue in my professors lecture slides which I think is wrong, and I'd wonder if any of you could confirm:
Alphabet: {1}
Automata
Surely the ...
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Is the positive existential theory undecidable?
Could you tell if the positive existential theory of $\mathbb{C}[e^{\mu x} \mid \mu \in \mathbb{C}]$ is undecidable in the language $\{+, \cdot , \frac{d}{dx} , 0, 1, e^x\}$ ?
How can we prove the (...
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Show that the positive existential theory is undecidable
To show that the positive existential theory of $\mathbb{C}[t, e^{\lambda t} \mid \lambda \in \mathbb{C}]$ in the language $\{+, \cdot , ' , 0 , 1, t\}$ is undecidable we have to prove the following: $...
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Extended definition of unambiguous language and the existence of unambiguous grammar
Let's extend the unambiguity of language and grammar as follows:
a language $L$ is unambiguous if there is a grammar that generates every word in $L$ in a unique way, the grammar may be of type 0 or ...
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Relation between indexed languages (OI-macro or context-free tree) and scattered context languages
I'm not sure about the relation between indexed languages (generated by indexed grammars--Aho) and scattered context languages (generated by
scattered context grammars--J Hopcroft).
I think that ...
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Vocabulary on monoid periodicity
I'm learning about periodic languages, and I'm confused over the vocabulary used to describe the periodicity of (syntactic) monoids.
If I understand correctly, a monoid M is periodic if :
$$(\forall ...
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Terminology for set of infinite strings with a certain prefix
Let $\mathcal{A}$ be a finite alphabet, and let $C$ be the Cantor space $\mathcal{A}^\omega$ under the product topology.
Given a finite string $s \in \mathcal{A}^*$, let $C(s)$ be the set of all ...
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Is there a ``Ladner's Theorem" for the PH-vs-PSPACE scenario?
Like a statement of the kind, ``If the Polynomial Hierarchy (PH) $\neq$ PSPACE then there exists $L \in PSPACE \backslash PH$ which is not PSPACE-complete"?
Or is there something else that states ...
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Is this variant of the balanced bracket language context free?
Consider the language generated by the following context free grammar:
$$
S \to SS \quad S \to () \quad S \to (S) \quad S \to [] \quad S \to [S]
$$
There is a one-to-one correspondence between this ...
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Counting path generating sentences in a specific formal language
Given a formal grammar of a language or an Turing machine of the language, can we count the path that generating sentences of the language?
For example, we know that if the grammar is context-free ...
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Are there any results on well-quasi-ordering of languages?
There are a number of papers that I can find about well-quasi-orders in formal lnaguage theory, by Kunc, de Luca, D'Alessandro, and Varricchio, among others. I am interested, however, in well-quasi ...
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Is there a name for infinite words containing every finite words?
Apparently, the closest thing I've found would be normal number http://mathworld.wolfram.com/NormalNumber.html
But requiring that every finite words occurs is weaker than this property. So I'm ...
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Question about link between non-terminals of grammars and variables of Diophantine equations
If we change the right arrow in the rewriting rules of grammar into equators , changes all terminals into x and keep the non-terminals unchanged,we get system of equations.In some cases,those ...
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Is it possible to classify all the inequivalent classes of first order sentence with quantifier rank fixed
It is known that for symbols with finite many relations, the number of inequivalent class of first order sentence with quantifier rank $m$ is finite. But is it possible to list (classify) them? At ...
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How to work out a grammar if we know the language?
How could we work out a grammar if we know the language? How could we work out a grammar if we know the language that is restricted to a special kind like CFL or CSL? For example, we know $$L=\{a^nb^...
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List of open problems of formal languages [closed]
As we know, there are some open problems of formal languages. I am wondering if there is a somehow complete list of open problem of formal languages. If there isn't such a list, can we make it one as ...
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Two sets of strings resulted from a set represented by binary and decimal code are in the same class of languages?
Two sets of strings resulted from a set represented by binary and decimal code are in the same class of languages as regular languages,context-free languages,context-sentive languages ,computable ...
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Question about $\omega$-regular languages
As most of you already know, in model checking most linear-time properties are either safety properties or liveness properties. A linear time property is usually described with an $\omega$-regular ...
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Separating infinite words sharing factors by automata
Two infinite words $\xi, \eta \in X^{\omega}$ are separated by an (Büchi-)automaton if it accepts one but not the other.
Denote by $F_n(\xi)$ the factors of length $n$ of an infinite word $\xi$ and ...
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Expressive power of first-order category theory
Given the signature $\lbrace \mathsf{dom}, \mathsf{cod}, \mathsf{id},\circ \rbrace$ and the axioms of category theory – which are expressible in the signature's first-order (FO) language – ...
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Notation for ends of a string
I work now a lot with strings of characters and other finite sequences and found that I need many times a good notation for "cutting the end" a string. If $a$ is a finite sequence and $a'$ is its ...
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The intersection of Block Groups and R-trivial (finite) monoids
Let $\textbf{BG}$ be the pseudovariety of block groups, also known as $\textbf{EJ}, \textbf{PG},\ldots,\text{etc.}$(see [1]), and let $\textbf{R}$ be the pseudovariety of R-trivial monoids, by the ...
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Generalising the adherence operator and its closure properties with regard to regular (rational) languages
Let $X$ be an alphabet and denote by $X^{\omega}$ the set of all infinite sequences (i.e. words) in $X$. A subset $L \subseteq X^{\omega}$ is called $\omega$-regular if it is acceptable by some Büchi-...
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Representability of sets of infinite sequences sharing common prefixes and factors (i.e. infixes)
Here we are concerned with the space $X^{\omega}$ of infinite sequences. Denote by $F_n(\xi)$
the set of factors (consecutive finite subsequences) of length $n$ and consider the set
$$
K_n(\xi) = \xi[...
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What prefix and factors determine a ultimately periodic word uniquely
Let $\xi$ be an ultimately periodic sequence, i.e. there exists finite sequences $p, q \in X^*$ such that $\xi = pq^{\omega}$. Does there exists a $n > 0$ such that the prefix of length $n$ and all ...
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