License: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license (CC BY 3.0)
When quoting this document, please refer to the following
DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.ICDT.2015.230
URN: urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-49878
URL: http://dagstuhl.sunsite.rwth-aachen.de/volltexte/2015/4987/
Go to the corresponding LIPIcs Volume Portal

Hofman, Piotr ; Martens, Wim

Separability by Short Subsequences and Subwords

pdf-format:
14.pdf (0.5 MB)

Abstract

The separability problem for regular languages asks, given two regular languages I and E, whether there exists a language S that separates the two, that is, includes I but contains nothing from E. Typically, S comes from a simple, less expressive class of languages than I and E. In general, a simple separator $S$ can be seen as an approximation of I or as an explanation of how I and E are different. In a database context, separators can be used for explaining the result of regular path queries or for finding explanations for the difference between paths in a graph database, that is, how paths from given nodes u_1 to v_1 are different from those from u_2 to v_2. We study the complexity of separability of regular languages by combinations of subsequences or subwords of a given length k. The rationale is that the parameter k can be used to influence the size and simplicity of the separator. The emphasis of our study is on tracing the tractability of the problem.

BibTeX - Entry

@InProceedings{hofman_et_al:LIPIcs:2015:4987,
  author =	{Piotr Hofman and Wim Martens},
  title =	{{Separability by Short Subsequences and Subwords}},
  booktitle =	{18th International Conference on Database Theory (ICDT 2015)},
  pages =	{230--246},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-939897-79-8},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2015},
  volume =	{31},
  editor =	{Marcelo Arenas and Mart{\'i}n Ugarte},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl--Leibniz-Zentrum fuer Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{http://drops.dagstuhl.de/opus/volltexte/2015/4987},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-49878},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.ICDT.2015.230},
  annote =	{Keywords: separability, complexity, graph data, debugging}
}

Keywords: separability, complexity, graph data, debugging
Collection: 18th International Conference on Database Theory (ICDT 2015)
Issue Date: 2015
Date of publication: 19.03.2015

DROPS-Home | Fulltext Search | Imprint | Privacy Published by LZI