No abstract

Abstract. We study the succinctness of the complement and intersection of regular expressions. In particular, we show that when constructing a regular expression defining the complement of a given regular expression, a double exponential size increase cannot be avoided. Similarly, when constructing a regular expression defining the intersection of a fixed and an arbitrary number of regular expressions, an exponential and double exponential size increase, respectively, can in worst-case not be avoided. All mentioned lower bounds improve the existing ones by one exponential and are tight in the sense that the target expression can be constructed in the corresponding time class, i.e., exponential or double exponential time. As a by-product, we generalize a theorem by Ehrenfeucht and Zeiger stating that there is a class of DFAs which are exponentially more succinct than regular expressions, to a fixed four-letter alphabet. When the given regular expressions are one-unambiguous, as for instance required by the XML Schema specification, the complement can be computed in polynomial time whereas the bounds concerning intersection continue to hold. For the subclass of single-occurrence regular expressions, we prove a tight exponential lower bound for intersection.

We study deterministic regular expressions extended with the counting operator. There exist two notions of determinism, strong and weak determinism, which almost coincide for standard regular expressions. This, however, changes dramatically in the presence of counting. In particular, we show that weakly deterministic expressions with counting are exponentially more succinct and strictly more expressive than strongly deterministic ones, even though they still do not capture all regular languages. In addition, we present a finite automaton model with counters, study its properties and investigate the natural extension of the Glushkov construction translating expressions with counting into such counting automata. This translation yields a deterministic automaton if and only if the expression is strongly deterministic. These results then also allow to derive upper bounds for decision problems for strongly deterministic expressions with counting.