Convergence of Newton's Method over Commutative Semirings

We give a lower bound on the speed at which Newton’s method (as defined in [5, 6]) converges over arbitrary ω-continuous commutative semirings. From this result, we deduce that Newton’s method converges within a finite number of iterations over any semiring which is “collapsed at some k ∈ N” (i.e. k = k + 1 holds) in the sense of [1]. We apply these results to (1) obtain a generalization of Parikh’s theorem, (2) to compute the provenance of Datalog queries, and (3) to analyze weighted pushdown systems. We further show how to compute Newton’s method over any ω-continuous semiring.