Stochastic approaches to natural language processing have often been preferred to rule-based approaches because of their robustness and their automatic training capabilities. This was the case for part-of-speech tagging until Brill showed how state-of-the-art part-of-speech tagging can be achieved with a rule-based tagger by inferring rules from a training corpus. However, current implementations of the rule-based tagger run more slowly than previous approaches. In this paper, we present a finite-state tagger, inspired by the rule-based tagger, that operates in optimal time in the sense that the time to assign tags to a sentence corresponds to the time required to follow a single path in a deterministic finite-state machine. This result is achieved by encoding the application of the rules found in the tagger as a nondeterministic finite-state transducer and then turning it into a deterministic transducer. The resulting deterministic transducer yields a part-of-speech tagger whose speed is dominated by the access time of mass storage devices. We then generalize the techniques to the class of transformation-based systems. 1.

We study deadlocks using geometric methods based on generalized process graphs [11], i.e., cubical complexes or Higher-Dimensional Automata (HDA) [23, 24, 30, 35], describing the semantics of the concurrent system of interest. A new algorithm is described and fully assessed, both theoretically and practically and compared with more well-known traversing techniques. An implementation is

this paper that the equality problem for M-rational series over an alphabet with at least two letters is undecidable.

We study the expressive power of linear propositional temporal logic interpreted on finite sequences or words. We first give a transparent proof of the fact that a formal language is expressible in this logic if and only if its syntactic semigroup is finite and aperiodic. This gives an effective algorithm to decide whether a given rational language is expressible. Our main result states a similar condition for the "restricted" temporal logic (RTL), obtained by discarding the "until" operator. A formal language is RTL-expressible if and only if its syntactic semigroup is finite and satisfies a certain simple algebraic condition. This leads

The need to measure sequence similarity arises in information extraction, object identity, data mining, biological sequence analysis, and other domains. This paper presents discriminative string-edit CRFs, a finitestate conditional random field model for edit sequences between strings. Conditional random fields have advantages over generative approaches to this problem, such as pair HMMs or the work of Ristad and Yianilos, because as conditionally-trained methods, they enable the use of complex, arbitrary actions and features of the input strings. As in generative models, the training data does not have to specify the edit sequences between the given string pairs. Unlike generative models, however, our model is trained on both positive and negative instances of string pairs. We present positive experimental results on several data sets. 1

This paper is a contribution to the algebraic theory of recognizable languages. The main topic of this paper is the polynomial closure, an operation that mixes together the operations of union and concatenation. Formally, the polynomial closure of a class of languages L of A ∗ is the set of languages

The Hall topology for the free group is the coarsest topology such that every group morphism from the free group onto a finite discrete group is continuous. It was shown by M. Hall Jr that every finitely generated subgroup of the free group is closed for this topology. We conjecture that if H1 ; H2 ; : : : ; Hn are finitely generated subgroups of the free group, then the product H1H2 Hn is closed. We discuss some consequences of this conjecture. First, it would give a nice and simple algorithm to compute the closure of a given rational subset of the free group. Next, it implies a similar conjecture for the free monoid, which, in turn, is equivalent to a deep conjecture on nite semigroup, for the solution of which J. Rhodes has offered $100. We hope that our new conjecture will shed some light on the Rhodes's conjecture.

This paper is an attempt to share with a larger audience some modern developments in the theory of finite automata. It is written for the mathematician who has a background in semigroup theory but knows next to nothing on automata and languages. No proofs are given, but the main results are illustrated by several examples and counterexamples

Abstract not found

this paper is to present other semirings that occur in theoretical computer science. These semirings were baptized tropical semirings by Dominique Perrin in honour of the pioneering work of our brazilian colleague and friend Imre Simon, but are also commonly known as (min; +)-semirings