Two finite words $u$ and $v$ are $k$-binomially equivalent if, for each word $x$ of length at most $k$, $x$ appears the same number of times as a subsequence (i.e., as a scattered subword) of both $u$ and $v$. This notion generalizes abelian equivalence. In this paper, we study the equivalence classes induced by the $k$-binomial equivalence with a special focus on the cardinalities of the classes. We provide an algorithm generating the $2$-binomial equivalence class of a word. For $k \geq 2$ and alphabet of $3$ or more symbols, the language made of lexicographically least elements of every $k$-binomial equivalence class and the language of singletons, i.e., the words whose $k$-binomial equivalence class is restricted to a single element, are shown to be non context-free. As a consequence of our discussions, we also prove that the submonoid generated by the generators of the free nil-$2$ group on $m$ generators is isomorphic to the quotient of the free monoid $\{ 1, \ldots , m\}^{*}$ by the $2$-binomial equivalence.
Two words are $k$-binomially equivalent if each subword of length at most $k$ occurs the same number of times in both words. The $k$-binomial complexity of an infinite word is a counting function that maps $n$ to the number of $k$-binomial equivalence classes represented by its factors of length $n$. Cassaigne et al. [Int. J. Found. Comput. S., 22(4) (2011)] characterized a family of morphisms, which we call Parikh-collinear, as those morphisms that map all words to words with bounded $1$-binomial complexity. Firstly, we extend this characterization: they map words with bounded $k$-binomial co…
Two finite words $u,v$ are 2-binomially equivalent if, for all words $x$ of length at most 2, the number of occurrences of $x$ as a (scattered) subword of $u$ is equal to the number of occurrences of $x$ in $v$. This notion is a refinement of the usual abelian equivalence. A 2-binomial square is a word $uv$ where $u$ and $v$ are 2-binomially equivalent. In this paper, considering pure morphic words, we prove that 2-binomial squares (resp. cubes) are avoidable over a 3-letter (resp. 2-letter) alphabet. The sizes of the alphabets are optimal.
Two words $w_1$ and $w_2$ are said to be $k$-binomial equivalent if every non-empty word $x$ of length at most $k$ over the alphabet of $w_1$ and $w_2$ appears as a scattered factor of $w_1$ exactly as many times as it appears as a scattered factor of $w_2$. We give two different polynomial-time algorithms testing the $k$-binomial equivalence of two words. The first one is deterministic (but the degree of the corresponding polynomial is too high) and the second one is randomised (it is more direct and more efficient). These are the first known algorithms for the problem which run in polynomial…
In the first part of this survey, we present classical notions arising in combinatorics on words: growth function of a language, complexity function of an infinite word, pattern avoidance, periodicity and uniform recurrence. Our presentation tries to set up a unified framework with respect to a given binary relation. In the second part, we mainly focus on abelian equivalence, $k$-abelian equivalence, combinatorial coefficients and associated relations, Parikh matrices and $M$-equivalence. In particular, some new refinements of abelian equivalence are introduced.
We survey known results and open problems in abelian combinatorics on words. Abelian combinatorics on words is the extension to the commutative setting of the classical theory of combinatorics on words. The extension is based on \emph{abelian equivalence}, which is the equivalence relation defined in the set of words by having the same Parikh vector, that is, the same number of occurrences of each letter of the alphabet. In the past few years, there was a lot of research on abelian analogues of classical definitions and properties in combinatorics on words. This survey aims to gather these res…
Parikh matrices have been extensively investigated due to their usefulness in studying subword occurrences in words. Due to the dependency of Parikh matrices on the ordering of the alphabet, strong M-equivalence was proposed as an order-independent alternative to M-equivalence in studying words possessing the same Parikh matrix. This paper introduces and studies the notions of strong 2.t and strong 3.t transformations in determining when two ternary words are strongly M-equivalent. The irreducibility of strong 2.t transformations are then scrutinized, exemplified by a structural characterizati…
We show that the equivalence of deterministic linear top-down tree-to-word transducers is decidable in polynomial time. Linear tree-to-word transducers are non-copying but not necessarily order-preserving and can be used to express XML and other document transformations. The result is based on a partial normal form that provides a basic characterization of the languages produced by linear tree-to-word transducers.
We consider equivalence and containment problems for word transductions. These problems are known to be undecidable when the transductions are relations between words realized by non-deterministic transducers, and become decidable when restricting to functions from words to words. Here we prove that decidability can be equally recovered by adopting a slightly different, but natural semantics, called origin semantics and introduced by Bojanczyk in 2014. Specifically, we prove that the equivalence and containment problems for two-way word transducers in the origin semantics are PSPACE-complete. …
In this note we provide a (decidable) graph-structural characterisation of the infiniteness of $L(w_1, ..., w_k)$, where $L(w_1, ..., w_k) = \{w \in A^* | |w|_{w_1} = \cdots = |w|_{w_k}\}$ is the set of all words that contain the same number of subword occurrences of parameter words $w_1, ..., w_k$. We also provide the decidable characterisation of the equivalence for those languages. Although those two decidability results are also obtained from more general known decidability results on unambiguous constrained automata, this note tries to give a self-contained (without the knowledge about co…
In this paper we investigate the word problem of the free Burnside semigroup satisfying x^2=x^3 and having two generators. Elements of this semigroup are classes of equivalent words. A natural way to solve the word problem is to select a unique "canonical" representative for each equivalence class. We prove that overlap-free words and so-called almost overlap-free words (this notion is some generalization of the notion of overlap-free words) can serve as canonical representatives for corresponding equivalence classes. We show that such a word in a given class, if any, can be efficiently found.…
This paper is concerned with the computational complexity of equivalence and minimisation for automata with transition weights in the field Q of rational numbers. We use polynomial identity testing and the Isolation Lemma to obtain complexity bounds, focussing on the class NC of problems within P solvable in polylogarithmic parallel time. For finite Q-weighted automata, we give a randomised NC procedure that either outputs that two automata are equivalent or returns a word on which they differ. We also give an NC procedure for deciding whether a given automaton is minimal, as well as a randomi…
There has been a growing interest in defining models of automata enriched with time, such as finite automata extended with clocks (timed automata). In this paper, we study deterministic timed finite state machines (TFSMs), i.e., finite state machines with a single clock, timed guards and timeouts which transduce timed input words into timed output words. We solve the problem of equivalence checking by defining a bisimulation from timed FSMs to untimed ones and viceversa. Moreover, we apply these bisimulation relations to build the intersection of two timed finite state machines by untiming the…
There has been a growing interest in defining models of automata enriched with time. For instance, timed automata were introduced as automata extended with clocks. In this paper, we study models of timed finite state machines (TFSMs), i.e., FSMs enriched with time, which accept timed input words and generate timed output words. Here we discuss some models of TFSMs with a single clock: TFSMs with timed guards, TFSMs with timeouts, and TFSMs with both timed guards and timeouts. We solve the problem of equivalence checking for all three models, and we compare their expressive power, characterizin…
We prove that language equivalence of deterministic one-counter automata is NL-complete. This improves the superpolynomial time complexity upper bound shown by Valiant and Paterson in 1975. Our main contribution is to prove that two deterministic one-counter automata are inequivalent if and only if they can be distinguished by a word of length polynomial in the size of the two input automata.
Transductions are binary relations of finite words. For rational transductions, i.e., transductions defined by finite transducers, the inclusion, equivalence and sequential uniformisation problems are known to be undecidable. In this paper, we investigate stronger variants of inclusion, equivalence and sequential uniformisation, based on a general notion of transducer resynchronisation, and show their decidability. We also investigate the classes of finite-valued rational transductions and deterministic rational transductions, which are known to have a decidable equivalence problem. We show th…
We show that equivalence of deterministic linear tree transducers can be decided in polynomial time when their outputs are interpreted over the free group. Due to the cancellation properties offered by the free group, the required constructions are not only more general, but also simpler than the corresponding constructions for proving equivalence of deterministic linear tree-to-word transducers.
The class of omega languages recognized by deterministic parity acceptors (DPAs) or deterministic Muller acceptors (DMAs) is exactly the regular omega languages. The inclusion problem is the following: given two acceptors A1 and A2, determine whether the language recognized by A1 is a subset of the language recognized by A2, and if not, return an ultimately periodic omega word accepted by A1 but not A2. We describe polynomial time algorithms to solve this problem for two DPAs and for two DMAs. Corollaries include polynomial time algorithms to solve the equivalence problem for DPAs and DMAs, an…
We prove lower bounds on the length of regular expressions for finite languages by methods from arithmetic circuit complexity. First, we show a reduction: the length of a regular expression for a language $L\subseteq \{0,1\}^n$ is bounded from below by the minimum size of a monotone arithmetic formula computing a polynomial that has $L$ as its set of exponent vectors, viewing words as vectors. This result yields lower bounds for the binomial language of all words with exactly $k$ ones and $n-k$ zeros and for the language of all Dyck words of length $2n$. We also determine the blow-up of langua…
The decidability of determining equivalence of deterministic multitape automata (or transducers) was a longstanding open problem until it was resolved by Harju and Karhumäki in the early 1990s. Their proof of decidability yields a co_NP upper bound, but apparently not much more is known about the complexity of the problem. In this paper we give an alternative proof of decidability, which follows the basic strategy of Harju and Karhumaki but replaces their use of group theory with results on matrix algebras. From our proof we obtain a simple randomised algorithm for deciding language equivalenc…
Piecewise testable languages are a subclass of the regular languages. There are many equivalent ways of defining them; Simon's congruence $\sim_k$ is one of the most classical approaches. Two words are $\sim_k$-equivalent if they have the same set of (scattered) subwords of length at most k. A language L is piecewise testable if there exists some k such that L is a union of $\sim_k$-classes. For each equivalence class of $\sim_k$, one can define a canonical representative in shortlex normal form, that is, the minimal word with respect to the lexicographic order among the shortest words in $\si…
Given a finite alphabet $Σ$ and a right-infinite word $w$ over the alphabet $Σ$, we construct a topological space ${\rm Rec}(w)$ consisting of all right-infinite recurrent words whose factors are all factors of $w$, where we work up to an equivalence in which two words are equivalent if they have the exact same set of factors (finite contiguous subwords). We show that ${\rm Rec}(w)$ can be endowed with a natural topology and we show that if $w$ is word of linear factor complexity then ${\rm Rec}(w)$ is a finite topological space. In addition, we note that there are examples which show that if …
We apply Stone duality and model theory to study the structure theory of free pro-aperiodic monoids. Stone duality implies that elements of the free pro-aperiodic monoid may be viewed as elementary equivalence classes of pseudofinite words. Model theory provides us with saturated words in each such class, i.e., words in which all possible factorizations are realized. We give several applications of this new approach, including a solution to the word problem for $ω$-terms that avoids using McCammond's normal forms, as well as new proofs and extensions of other structural results concerning free…
