Decision Problems for Convex Languages

We examine decision problems for various classes of convex languages, previously studied by Ang and Brzozowski under the name “continuous languages”. We can decide whether a language L is prefix-, suffix-, factor-, or subword-convex in polynomial time if L is represented by a DFA, but the problem is PSPACE-hard if L is represented by an NFA. If a regular language is not convex, we prove tight upper bounds on the length of the shortest words demonstrating this fact, in terms of the number of states of an accepting DFA. Similar results are proved for some subclasses of convex languages: the prefix-, suffix-, factor-, and subword-closed languages, and the prefix-, suffix-, factor-, and subword-free languages.