A Categorical Approach to Syntactic Monoids
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The syntactic monoid of a language is generalized to the level of a symmetric monoidal closed category D. This allows for a uniform treatment of several notions of syntactic algebras known in the literature, including the syntactic monoids of Rabin and Scott ( D= sets), the syntactic ordered monoids of Pin ( D = posets), the syntactic semirings of Polák ( D= semilattices), and the syntactic associative algebras of Reutenauer ( D = vector spaces). Assuming that D is a commutative variety of algebras or ordered algebras, we prove that the syntactic D-monoid of a language L can be constructed as a quotient of a free D-monoid modulo the syntactic congruence of L, and that it is isomorphic to the transition D-monoid of the minimal automaton for L in D. Furthermore, in the case where the variety D is locally finite, we characterize the regular languages as precisely the languages with finite syntactic D-monoids.
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