0000000000704173

AUTHOR

Pierre Mckenzie

The Many Faces of a Translation

First-order translations have recently been characterized as the maps computed by aperiodic single-valued nondeterministic finite transducers (NFTs). It is shown here that this characterization lifts to "V-translations" and "V-single-valued-NFTs", where V is an arbitrary monoid pseudovariety. More strikingly, 2-way V-machines are introduced, and the following three models are shown exactly equivalent to Eilenberg's classical notion of a bimachine when V is a group variety or when V is the variety of aperiodic monoids: V-translations, V-single-valued-NFTs and 2-way V-transducers.

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The Descriptive Complexity Approach to LOGCFL

Building upon the known generalized-quantifier-based firstorder characterization of LOGCFL, we lay the groundwork for a deeper investigation. Specifically, we examine subclasses of LOGCFL arising from varying the arity and nesting of groupoidal quantifiers. Our work extends the elaborate theory relating monoidal quantifiers to NC1 and its subclasses. In the absence of the BIT predicate, we resolve the main issues: we show in particular that no single outermost unary groupoidal quantifier with FO can capture all the context-free languages, and we obtain the surprising result that a variant of Greibach's "hardest contextfree language" is LOGCFL-complete under quantifier-free BIT-free interpre…

research product

The Descriptive Complexity Approach to LOGCFL

Building upon the known generalized-quantifier-based first-order characterization of LOGCFL, we lay the groundwork for a deeper investigation. Specifically, we examine subclasses of LOGCFL arising from varying the arity and nesting of groupoidal quantifiers. Our work extends the elaborate theory relating monoidal quantifiers to NC1 and its subclasses. In the absence of the BIT predicate, we resolve the main issues: we show in particular that no single outermost unary groupoidal quantifier with FO can capture all the context-free languages, and we obtain the surprising result that a variant of Greibach's ``hardest context-free language'' is LOGCFL-complete under quantifier-free BIT-free proj…

research product