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Regular Expressions with Backreferences and Lookaheads Capture NLOG

Author Yuya Uezato

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LIPIcs.ICALP.2024.155.pdf
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Yuya Uezato
  • CyberAgent, Inc., Tokyo, Japan
  • National Institute of Informatics, Tokyo, Japan

Funding

This work was supported by JST, CREST Grant Number JPMJCR21M3.

Acknowledgements

I thank anonymous reviewers for their detailed comments on a previous version of this paper. I also sincerely thank anonymous reviewers for their careful reading and invaluable comments on the current version. All comments helped me to significantly improve the presentation of this paper and the clarity of proofs and constructions.

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Yuya Uezato. Regular Expressions with Backreferences and Lookaheads Capture NLOG. In 51st International Colloquium on Automata, Languages, and Programming (ICALP 2024). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 297, pp. 155:1-155:20, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2024) https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.ICALP.2024.155

Abstract

Backreferences and lookaheads are vital features to make classical regular expressions (REGEX) practical. Although these features have been widely used, understanding of the unrestricted combination of them has been limited. Practically, most likely, no implementation fully supports them. Theoretically, while some studies have addressed these features separately, few have dared to combine them. Those few studies showed that the amalgamation of these features significantly enhances the expressiveness of REGEX. However, no acceptable expressivity bound for REWBLk - REGEX with backreferences and lookaheads - has been established. We elucidate this by establishing that REWBLk coincides with NLOG, the class of languages accepted by log-space nondeterministic Turing machines (NTMs). In translating REWBLk to log-space NTMs, negative lookaheads are the most challenging part since it essentially requires complementing log-space NTMs in nondeterministic log-space. To address this problem, we revisit Immerman-Szelepcsényi theorem. In addition, we employ log-space nested-oracles NTMs to naturally handle nested lookaheads of REWBLk. Utilizing such oracle machines, we also present the new result that the membership problem of REWBLk is PSPACE-complete.

Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Theory of computation → Formal languages and automata theory
  • Theory of computation → Complexity classes
Keywords
  • Regular Expression
  • Automata Theory
  • Nondeterministic Log-Space

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