Finite automata for the sub- and superword closure of CFLs: Descriptional and computational complexity

Georg Bachmeier, Michael Luttenberger, Maximilian Schlund

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

15 Scopus citations

Abstract

We answer two open questions by (Gruber, Holzer, Kutrib, 2009) on the state-complexity of representing sub- or superword closures of context-free grammars (CFGs): (1) We prove a (tight) upper bound of 2O(n)on the size of nondeterministic finite automata (NFAs) representing the subword closure of a CFG of size n. (2) We present a family of CFGs for which the minimal deterministic finite automata representing their subword closure matches the upper-bound of 22O(n)following from (1). Furthermore, we prove that the inequivalence problem for NFAs representing sub- or superword-closed languages is only NP-complete as opposed to PSPACE-complete for general NFAs. Finally, we extend our results into an approximation method to attack inequivalence problems for CFGs.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationLanguage and Automata Theory and Applications - 9th International Conference, LATA 2015, Proceedings
EditorsAdrian-Horia Dediu, Carlos Martín-Vide, Enrico Formenti, Bianca Truthe
PublisherSpringer Verlag
Pages473-485
Number of pages13
ISBN (Electronic)9783319155784
DOIs
StatePublished - 2015
Event9th International Conference on Language and Automata Theory and Applications, LATA 2015 - Nice, France
Duration: 2 Mar 20156 Mar 2015

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume8977
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Conference

Conference9th International Conference on Language and Automata Theory and Applications, LATA 2015
Country/TerritoryFrance
CityNice
Period2/03/156/03/15

Keywords

  • Descriptional complexity
  • Language approximation
  • Nfa equivalence
  • Subword closure

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