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Separating Regular Languages with First-Order Logic

Thomas Place ; Marc Zeitoun.

Given two languages, a separator is a third language that contains the first one and is disjoint from the second one. We investigate the following decision problem: given two regular input languages of finite words, decide whether there exists a first-order definable separator. We prove that in&nbsp;[&hellip;]

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The Covering Problem

Thomas Place ; Marc Zeitoun.

An important endeavor in computer science is to understand the expressive power of logical formalisms over discrete structures, such as words. Naturally, "understanding" is not a mathematical notion. This investigation requires therefore a concrete objective to capture this understanding. In the&nbsp;[&hellip;]

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Separating regular languages with two quantifier alternations

Thomas Place.

We investigate a famous decision problem in automata theory: separation. Given a class of language C, the separation problem for C takes as input two regular languages and asks whether there exists a third one which belongs to C, includes the first one and is disjoint from the second. Typically,&nbsp;[&hellip;]

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Separation for dot-depth two

Thomas Place ; Marc Zeitoun.

The dot-depth hierarchy of Brzozowski and Cohen classifies the star-free languages of finite words. By a theorem of McNaughton and Papert, these are also the first-order definable languages. The dot-depth rose to prominence following the work of Thomas, who proved an exact correspondence with the&nbsp;[&hellip;]

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