Membership and Finiteness Problems for Rational Sets of Regular Languages

Abstract

Let Σ be a finite alphabet. A set [Formula: see text] of regular languages over Σ is called rational if there exists a finite set [Formula: see text] of regular languages over Σ such that [Formula: see text] is a rational subset of the finitely generated semigroup [Formula: see text] with [Formula: see text] as the set of generators and language concatenation as a product. We prove that for any rational set [Formula: see text] and any regular language R ⊆ Σ* it is decidable (1) whether [Formula: see text] or not, and (2) whether [Formula: see text] is finite or not. Possible applications to semistructured databases query processing are discussed.