Stallings foldings for rational subsets of automatic groups

Let $G$ be an automatic group with associated regular language $L$.

We describe a procedure for constructing an automaton which recognises elements of a given submonoid or rational subset $K$ of $G$.

This builds on work of Kharlampovich, Miasnikov and Weil, on the case where $K$ is a subgroup of $G$.

Our construction succeeds, after sufficiently many iterations, whenever $K$ satisfies a certain convexity property, which we call $L$-proximity.

We show how to test whether the construction is complete in the case that $K$ is a submonoid; we have no such test for the general case of a rational subset $K$.

We focus particularly on the case of a surface group $G$ of genus $g>1$, where $L$ is the language of geodesic words in the standard generators.

We use small cancellation theory to obtain a method for constructing $L$-recognisable submonoids of $G$.