Scoped MSO, Register Automata, and Expressions: Equivalence over Data Words

📅 2026-02-13
📈 Citations: 0
Influential: 0
📄 PDF

career value

181K/year

Technology Category

Application Category

📝 Abstract
This paper establishes logical and expression-based characterizations for the class of languages recognized by nondeterministic register automata with guessing (NRA) over infinite alphabets. We introduce Scoped MSO, a logic featuring a novel segment modality and syntactic restrictions on data comparisons. We prove this logic is expressively equivalent to NRA over data domains where ``strong guessing''can be eliminated. Furthermore, we define Data-Regular Expressions, a minimalist regular-expression calculus built from quantifier-free regions and equipped with $k$-contracting concatenation, and demonstrate its equivalence to NRA over arbitrary relational structures. Together, these formalisms provide a robust descriptive theory for register automata, bridging the gap between automata, logic, and expressions.
Problem

Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.

register automata
data words
logical characterization
regular expressions
infinite alphabets
Innovation

Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.

Scoped MSO
Register Automata
Data-Regular Expressions
segment modality
k-contracting concatenation