Complexity of certain decision problems about congruential languages

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Abstract

Given an arbitrary finite Church-Rosser Thue system S, it is shown that the question of whether a given congruence class is finite is undecidable, and the question of whether every congruence class is finite is not even semidecidable (in fact, Π2-complete). It is shown that the question of whether a given (resp. every) congruence class is a context-free language is at least as hard. Also, given a finite rewriting system over a commutative monoid, the question of whether every congruence class is finite is shown to be tractable. This contrasts with the known result that the question of whether a given congruence class is finite requires space at least exponential in the square root of the input length.

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