Adding pebbles to weighted automata: Easy specification & efficient evaluation

We extend weighted automata and weighted rational expressions with 2-way moves and reusable pebbles. We show with examples from natural language modeling and quantitative model-checking that weighted expressions and automata with pebbles are more expressive and allow much more natural and intuitive specifications than classical ones. We extend Kleene–Schützenberger theorem showing that weighted expressions and automata with pebbles have the same expressive power. We focus on an efficient translation from expressions to automata. We also prove that the evaluation problem for weighted automata can be done very efficiently if the number of reusable pebbles is low.