Sound and complete axiomatizations of coalgebraic language equivalence

Abstract

Coalgebras provide a uniform framework for studying dynamical systems, including several types of automata. In this article, we make use of the coalgebraic view on systems to investigate, in a uniform way, under which conditions calculi that are sound and complete with respect to behavioral equivalence can be extended to a coarser coalgebraic language equivalence, which arises from a generalized powerset construction that determinizes coalgebras. We show that soundness and completeness are established by proving that expressions modulo axioms of a calculus form the rational fixpoint of the given type functor. Our main result is that the rational fixpoint of the functor FT, where T is a monad describing the branching of the systems (e.g., non-determinism, weights, probability, etc.), has as a quotient the rational fixpoint of the determinized type functor F, a lifting of F to the category of T-algebras. We apply our framework to the concrete example of weighted automata, for which we present a new sound and complete calculus for weighted language equivalence. As a special case, we obtain nondeterministic automata in which we recover Rabinovich’s sound and complete calculus for language equivalence.