Bounded repairability of word languages

Michael Benedikt (1) , Gabriele Puppis (2) , Cristian Riveros (3)

1 OUCL - Computing Laboratory
2 LaBRI - Laboratoire Bordelais de Recherche en Informatique
3 UC - Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile

What do you do if a computational object (e.g. program trace) fails a specifica-tion? An obvious approach is to perform a repair : modify the object minimally to get something that satisfies the constraints. This approach has been in-vestigated in the database community, for integrity constraints, and in the AI community for propositional logics. Here we study how difficult it is to repair a document in the form of a string. Specifically, we consider number of edits that must be applied to an input string in order to satisfy a given target lan-guage. This number may be unbounded; our main contribution is to isolate the complexity of the bounded repair problem based on a characterization of the regular languages that admit bounded repairr. We consider the settings where the repair strategy is unconstrained and when the editing must be produced in a streaming way, i.e. by a letter-to-letter transducer.

Mots clés: bounded repair; edit distance; regular languages

Domaines: Théorie et langage formel [cs.FL]

Michael Benedikt, Gabriele Puppis, Cristian Riveros. Bounded repairability of word languages. Journal of Computer and System Sciences, 2013, 79 (8), pp.1302 - 1321. ⟨10.1016/j.jcss.2013.06.001⟩. ⟨hal-01076529⟩