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Consensual languages and matching finite-state computations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 March 2011

Stefano Crespi Reghizzi  and
Pierluigi San Pietro
Stefano Crespi Reghizzi
Affiliation:
Dipartimento di Elettronica e Informazione, Politecnico di Milano, Piazza Leonardo da Vinci, 32, 20133 Milano, Italy; {crespi;sanpietro}@elet.polimi.it
Pierluigi San Pietro
Affiliation:
Dipartimento di Elettronica e Informazione, Politecnico di Milano, Piazza Leonardo da Vinci, 32, 20133 Milano, Italy; {crespi;sanpietro}@elet.polimi.it
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Abstract

An ever present, common sense idea in language modelling research is that, for a word to be a valid phrase, it should comply with multiple constraints at once. A new language definition model is studied, based on agreement or consensus between similar strings. Considering a regular set of strings over a bipartite alphabet made by pairs of unmarked/marked symbols, a match relation is introduced, in order to specify when such strings agree. Then a regular set over the bipartite alphabet can be interpreted as specifying another language over the unmarked alphabet, called the consensual language. A word is in the consensual language if a set of corresponding matching strings is in the original language. The family thus defined includes the regular languages and also interesting non-semilinear ones. The word problem can be solved in NLOGSPACE, hence in P time. The emptiness problem is undecidable. Closure properties are proved for intersection with regular sets and inverse alphabetical homomorphism. Several conditions for a consensual definition to yield a regular language are presented, and it is shown that the size of a consensual specification of regular languages can be in a logarithmic ratio with respect to a DFA. The family is incomparable with context-free and tree-adjoining grammar families.

Keywords

Formal languagesfinite automataconsensual languagescounter machinespolynomial time parsingnon-semilinear languagesParikh mappingdescriptive complexity of regular languagesdegree of grammaticality
Type
Research Article
Information
RAIRO - Theoretical Informatics and Applications , Volume 45 , Issue 1: ICTCS 09 , January 2011 , pp. 77 - 97
Copyright
© EDP Sciences, 2011

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