Group presentations, formal languages and characterizations of one- counter groups (Q1210289)

The set of words in the alphabet of generators of a group equal to the identity element of this group is called a group language. Such languages could be classified according to the classes studied in the theory of formal languages. The problem is to describe groups having group languages corresponding to the most interesting classes of formal languages such as regular, context-free and one-counter formal languages. This topic was started firstly by the reviewer in 1971 and afterwards a lot of interesting results in this field were obtained by many other researchers. The considered paper is a complete modern survey of the topic mentioned above. Some new results on one-counter groups are also included.