An Algebraic Characterization of Strictly Piecewise Languages

This paper provides an algebraic characterization of the Strictly Piecewise class of languages studied by Rogers et al. 2010. These language are a natural subclass of the Piecewise Testable languages (Simon 1975) and are relevant to natural language. The algebraic characterization highlights a similarity between the Strictly Piecewise and Strictly Local languages, and also leads to a procedure which can decide whether a regular language L is Strictly Piecewise in polynomial time in the size of the syntactic monoid for L.

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