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Adding Successor: A Transfer Theorem for Separation and Covering

Published: 17 November 2019 Publication History

Abstract

Given a class C of word languages, the C-separation problem asks for an algorithm that, given as input two regular languages, decides whether there exists a third language in C containing the first language, while being disjoint from the second. Separation is usually investigated as a means to obtain a deep understanding of the class C.
In this article, we are mainly interested in classes defined by logical formalisms. Such classes are often built on top of each other: given some logic, one builds a stronger one by adding new predicates to its signature. A natural construction is to enrich a logic with the successor relation. In this article, we present a transfer result applying to this construction: We show that for suitable logically defined classes, separation for the logic enriched with the successor relation reduces to separation for the original logic. Our theorem also applies to a problem that is stronger than separation: covering. Moreover, we actually present two reductions: one for languages of finite words and the other for languages of infinite words.

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      Published In

      cover image ACM Transactions on Computational Logic
      ACM Transactions on Computational Logic  Volume 21, Issue 2
      April 2020
      316 pages
      ISSN:1529-3785
      EISSN:1557-945X
      DOI:10.1145/3371152
      • Editor:
      • Orna Kupferman
      Issue’s Table of Contents
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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      Publication History

      Published: 17 November 2019
      Accepted: 01 August 2019
      Revised: 01 March 2019
      Received: 01 December 2017
      Published in TOCL Volume 21, Issue 2

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      Author Tags

      1. Regular languages
      2. covering problem
      3. decidable characterization
      4. first-order logic
      5. membership problem
      6. separation problem

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      • (2024)The omega-reducibility of pseudovarieties of ordered monoids representing low levels of concatenation hierarchiesInternational Journal of Algebra and Computation10.1142/S021819672450002434:01(87-135)Online publication date: 7-Mar-2024
      • (2023)Living without Beth and Craig: Definitions and Interpolants in Description and Modal Logics with Nominals and Role InclusionsACM Transactions on Computational Logic10.1145/359730124:4(1-51)Online publication date: 10-Oct-2023
      • (2022)The amazing mixed polynomial closure and its applications to two-variable first-order logicProceedings of the 37th Annual ACM/IEEE Symposium on Logic in Computer Science10.1145/3531130.3532410(1-14)Online publication date: 2-Aug-2022
      • (2021)Pointlike Sets and Separation: A Personal PerspectiveDevelopments in Language Theory10.1007/978-3-030-81508-0_3(27-40)Online publication date: 6-Aug-2021

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