Universally Wheeler Languages

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Becker, Ruben, Castiglione, Giuseppa, D'Agostino, Giovanna, Policriti, Alberto, Prezza, Nicola, Restivo, Antonio, Riccardi, Brian
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Becker, Ruben
Castiglione, Giuseppa
D'Agostino, Giovanna
Policriti, Alberto
Prezza, Nicola
Restivo, Antonio
Riccardi, Brian
author_facet Becker, Ruben
Castiglione, Giuseppa
D'Agostino, Giovanna
Policriti, Alberto
Prezza, Nicola
Restivo, Antonio
Riccardi, Brian
contents The notion of Wheeler languages is rooted in the Burrows-Wheeler transform (BWT), one of the most central concepts in data compression and indexing. The BWT has been generalized to finite automata, the so-called Wheeler automata, by Gagie et al. [Theor. Comput. Sci. 2017]. Wheeler languages have subsequently been defined as the class of regular languages for which there exists a Wheeler automaton accepting them. Besides their advantages in data indexing, these Wheelerlanguages also satisfy many interesting properties from a language theoretic point of view [Alanko et al., Inf. Comput. 2021]. A characteristic yet unsatisfying feature of Wheeler languages however is that their definition depends on a fixed order of the alphabet. In this paper we introduce the Universally Wheeler languages UW, i.e., the regular languages that are Wheeler with respect to all orders of a given alphabet. Our first main contribution is to relate UW to some very well known regular language classes. We first show that the Striclty Locally Testable languages are strictly included in UW. After noticing that UW is not closed under taking the complement, we prove that the class of languages for which both the language and its complement are in UW exactly coincides with those languages that are Definite or Reverse Definite. Secondly, we prove that deciding if a regular language given by a DFA is in UW can be done in quadratic time. We also show that this is optimal unless the Strong Exponential Time Hypothesis (SETH) fails.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_19537
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Universally Wheeler Languages
Becker, Ruben
Castiglione, Giuseppa
D'Agostino, Giovanna
Policriti, Alberto
Prezza, Nicola
Restivo, Antonio
Riccardi, Brian
Formal Languages and Automata Theory
The notion of Wheeler languages is rooted in the Burrows-Wheeler transform (BWT), one of the most central concepts in data compression and indexing. The BWT has been generalized to finite automata, the so-called Wheeler automata, by Gagie et al. [Theor. Comput. Sci. 2017]. Wheeler languages have subsequently been defined as the class of regular languages for which there exists a Wheeler automaton accepting them. Besides their advantages in data indexing, these Wheelerlanguages also satisfy many interesting properties from a language theoretic point of view [Alanko et al., Inf. Comput. 2021]. A characteristic yet unsatisfying feature of Wheeler languages however is that their definition depends on a fixed order of the alphabet. In this paper we introduce the Universally Wheeler languages UW, i.e., the regular languages that are Wheeler with respect to all orders of a given alphabet. Our first main contribution is to relate UW to some very well known regular language classes. We first show that the Striclty Locally Testable languages are strictly included in UW. After noticing that UW is not closed under taking the complement, we prove that the class of languages for which both the language and its complement are in UW exactly coincides with those languages that are Definite or Reverse Definite. Secondly, we prove that deciding if a regular language given by a DFA is in UW can be done in quadratic time. We also show that this is optimal unless the Strong Exponential Time Hypothesis (SETH) fails.
title Universally Wheeler Languages
topic Formal Languages and Automata Theory
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.19537