A note on Context Sensitive languages and Word Problems

Abstract

Anisimov and Seifert show that a group has a regular word problem ifand only if it is finite. Muller and Schupp (together with Dunwoody's accessibility result) show that a group has context free word problem if and only if it is virtually free. In this note, we exhibit a class of groups where the word problem is as close as possible to being a context sensitive language. This class includes the automatic groups and is closed under passing to finitely generated subgroups. Consequently, it is quite large, including many groups which are not finitely presented.