ELibM mirror of EPTCS 63

From Regular to Strictly Locally Testable Languages

Stefano Crespi Reghizzi
(Dipartimento di Elettronica e Informazione, Politecnico di Milano)
Pierluigi San Pietro
(Dipartimento di Elettronica e Informazione, Politecnico di Milano)

A classical result (often credited to Y. Medvedev) states that every language recognized by a finite automaton is the homomorphic image of a local language, over a much larger so-called local alphabet, namely the alphabet of the edges of the transition graph. Local languages are characterized by the value k=2 of the sliding window width in the McNaughton and Papert's infinite hierarchy of strictly locally testable languages (k-slt). We generalize Medvedev's result in a new direction, studying the relationship between the width and the alphabetic ratio telling how much larger the local alphabet is. We prove that every regular language is the image of a k-slt language on an alphabet of doubled size, where the width logarithmically depends on the automaton size, and we exhibit regular languages for which any smaller alphabetic ratio is insufficient. More generally, we express the trade-off between alphabetic ratio and width as a mathematical relation derived from a careful encoding of the states. At last we mention some directions for theoretical development and application.

In Petr Ambrož, Štěpán Holub and Zuzana Masáková: Proceedings 8th International Conference Words 2011 (WORDS 2011), Prague, Czech Republic, 12-16th September 2011, Electronic Proceedings in Theoretical Computer Science 63, pp. 103–111.
Published: 17th August 2011.

ArXived at: http://dx.doi.org/10.4204/EPTCS.63.14 bibtex PDF
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