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International Workshop on Reachability Problems

RP 2013: Reachability Problems pp 146–158Cite as

Formal Languages, Word Problems of Groups and Decidability

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 8169))

Abstract

This paper considers questions relating formal languages to word problems of groups with a particular emphasis on the decidability of some problems that arise. We investigate the decidability of certain natural conditions that characterize word problems for various classes of languages and we then turn our attention to the question of a language actually being a word problem. We show that this is decidable for the classes of regular and deterministic context-free languages but undecidable for the one-counter languages.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, University of Leicester, Leicester, LE1 7RH, U.K.

    Sam A. M. Jones & Richard M. Thomas

Authors
  1. Sam A. M. Jones
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  2. Richard M. Thomas
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Uppsala University, Sweden

    Parosh Aziz Abdulla

  2. University of Liverpool, Ashton Building, UK

    Igor Potapov

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Jones, S.A.M., Thomas, R.M. (2013). Formal Languages, Word Problems of Groups and Decidability. In: Abdulla, P.A., Potapov, I. (eds) Reachability Problems. RP 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8169. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-41036-9_14

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-41036-9_14

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-41035-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-41036-9

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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