Abstract
In the traditional view, a language is a set of words, i.e., a function from words to boolean values. We call this view “qualitative,” because each word either belongs to or does not belong to a language. Let Σ be an alphabet, and let us consider infinite words over Σ. Formally, a qualitative language over Σ is a function A: \(\Sigma^\omega\rightarrow\mathbb{B}\). There are many applications of qualitative languages. For example, qualitative languages are used to specify the legal behaviors of systems, and zero-sum objectives of games played on graphs. In the former case, each behavior of a system is either legal or illegal; in the latter case, each outcome of a game is either winning or losing. For defining languages, it is convenient to use finite acceptors (or generators). In particular, qualitative languages are often defined using finite-state machines (so-called ω-automata) whose transitions are labeled by letters from Σ. For example, the states of an ω-automaton may represent states of a system, and the transition labels may represent atomic observables of a behavior. There is a rich and well-studied theory of finite-state acceptors of qualitative languages, namely, the theory of theω-regular languages.
This research was supported in part by the Swiss National Science Foundation and by the NSF grant CCR-0225610.
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Henzinger, T.A. (2007). Quantitative Generalizations of Languages. In: Harju, T., Karhumäki, J., Lepistö, A. (eds) Developments in Language Theory. DLT 2007. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4588. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-73208-2_2
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