Weakly and strongly irreversible regular languages

Finite automata whose computations can be reversed, at any point, by knowing the last k symbols read from the input, for a fixed k, are considered. These devices and their accepted languages are called k-reversible automata and k-reversible languages, respectively. The existence of k-reversible languages which are not (k-1)-reversible is known, for each k > 1. This gives an infinite hierarchy of weakly irreversible languages, i.e., languages which are k-reversible for some k. Conditions characterizing the class of k-reversible languages, for each fixed k, and the class of weakly irreversible languages are obtained. From these conditions, a procedure that given a finite automaton decides if the accepted language is weakly or strongly (i.e., not weakly) irreversible is described. Furthermore, a construction which allows to transform any finite automaton which is not k-reversible, but which accepts a k-reversible language, into an equivalent k-reversible finite automaton, is presented.