A Hierarchy of Automatic Words having a Decidable MSO Theory

Abstract

We investigate automatic presentations of infinite words. Starting points of our study are the works of Rigo and Maes, and Carton and Thomas concerning the lexicographic presentation, respectively the decidability of the MSO theory of morphic words. Refining their techniques we observe that the lexicographic presentation of a (morphic) word is canonical in a certain sense. We then go on to generalize our techniques to a hierarchy of classes of infinite words enjoying the above mentioned properties. We introduce k-lexicographic presentations, and morphisms of level k stacks and show that these are inter-translatable, thus giving rise to the same classes of k-lexicographic or level k morphic words. We prove that these presentations are also canonical, which implies decidability of the MSO theory of every k-lexicographic word as well as closure of these classes under restricted MSO interpretations, e.g. closure under deterministic sequential mappings. The classes of k-lexicographic words are shown to form an infinite hierarchy.