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A pattern is a word that consists of variables and terminal symbols. The pattern language that is generated by a pattern A is the set of all terminal words that can be obtained from A by uniform replacement of variables with terminal words. For example, the pattern A = a x y a x (where x and y are variables, and the letter a is a terminal symbol) generates the set of all words that have some word a x both as prefix and suffix (where these two occurrences of a x do not overlap). Due to their simple definition, pattern languages have various connections to a wide range of other areas in theoretical computer science and mathematics. Among these areas are combinatorics on words, logic, and the theory of free semigroups. On the other hand, many of the canonical questions in formal language theory are surprisingly difficult. The present thesis discusses various aspects of the inclusion problem of pattern languages. It can be divide in two parts. The first one examines the decidability of pattern languages with a limited number of variables and fixed terminal alphabets. In addition to this, the minimizability of regular expressions with repetition operators is studied. The second part deals with descriptive patterns, the smallest generalizations of arbitrary languages through pattern languages ("smallest" with respect to the inclusion relation). Main questions are the existence and the discoverability of descriptive patterns for arbitrary languages.
We investigate unary regular languages and compare deterministic finite automata (DFA’s), nondeterministic finite automata (NFA’s) and probabilistic finite automata (PFA’s) with respect to their size. Given a unary PFA with n states and an e-isolated cutpoint, we show that the minimal equivalent DFA has at most n exp 1/2e states in its cycle. This result is almost optimal, since for any alpha < 1 a family of PFA’s can be constructed such that every equivalent DFA has at least n exp alpha/2e states. Thus we show that for the model of probabilistic automata with a constant error bound, there is only a polynomial blowup for cyclic languages. Given a unary NFA with n states, we show that efficiently approximating the size of a minimal equivalent NFA within the factor sqrt(n)/ln n is impossible unless P = NP. This result even holds under the promise that the accepted language is cyclic. On the other hand we show that we can approximate a minimal NFA within the factor ln n, if we are given a cyclic unary n-state DFA.