On the Use of Quasiorders in Formal Language Theory

Abstract: In this thesis we use quasiorders on words to offer a new perspective on two well-studied problems from Formal Language Theory: deciding language inclusion and manipulating the finite automata representations of regular languages. First, we present a generic quasiorder-based framework that, when instantiated with different quasiorders, yields different algorithms (some of them new) for deciding language inclusion. We then instantiate this framework to devise an efficient algorithm for searching with regular expressions on grammar-compressed text. Finally, we define a framework of quasiorder-based automata constructions to offer a new perspective on residual automata.