Computing Maximal Error-detecting Capabilities and Distances of Regular Languages.

A (combinatorial) channel consists of pairs of words representing all possible input-output channel situations. In a past paper, we formalized the intuitive concept of 'largest amount of errors' detectable by a given language L, by defining the maximal error-detecting capabilities of L with respect to a given class of channels, and we showed how to compute all maximal error-detecting capabilities (channels) of a given regular language with respect to the class of rational channels and a class of channels involving only the substitution-error type. In this paper we resolve the problem for channels involving any combination of the basic error types: substitution, insertion, deletion. Moreover, we consider the problem of finding the inverses of these channels, in view of the fact that L is error-detecting for γ if and only if it is error-detecting for the inverse of γ. We also discuss a natural method of reducing the problem of computing (inner) distances of a given regular language L to the problem of computing maximal error-detecting capabilities of L. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]