Reordering Derivatives of Trace Closures of Regular Languages (Full Version)

Abstract

We provide syntactic derivative-like operations, defined by recursion on regular expressions, in the styles of both Brzozowski and Antimirov, for trace closures of regular languages. Just as the Brzozowski and Antimirov derivative operations for regular languages, these syntactic reordering derivative operations yield deterministic and nondeterministic automata respectively. But trace closures of regular languages are in general not regular, hence these automata cannot generally be finite. Still, as we show, for star-connected expressions, the Antimirov and Brzozowski automata, suitably quotiented, are finite. We also define a refined version of the Antimirov reordering derivative operation where parts-of-derivatives (states of the automaton) are nonempty lists of regular expressions rather than single regular expressions. We define the uniform scattering rank of a language and show that, for a regexp whose language has finite uniform scattering rank, the truncation of the (generally infinite) refined Antimirov automaton, obtained by removing long states, is finite without any quotienting, but still accepts the trace closure. We also show that star-connected languages have finite uniform scattering rank.