Complexity of Problems for Commutative Grammars

Abstract: We consider Parikh images of languages accepted by non-deterministic finite automata and context-free grammars; in other words, we treat the languages in a commutative way --- we do not care about the order of letters in the accepted word, but rather how many times each one of them appears. In most cases we assume that the alphabet is of fixed size. We show tight complexity bounds for problems like membership, equivalence, and disjointness. In particular, we show polynomial algorithms for membership and disjointness for Parikh images of non-deterministic finite automata over fixed alphabet, and we show that equivalence is Pi2P complete for context-free grammars over fixed terminal alphabet.