Valence automata as weighted automata

In this talk we will discuss a way in which it is possible to regard valence automata as weighted automata over suitably chosen semirings, together with a "threshold language" interpretation. This way, it is possible to obtain e.g. context-free and even recursively enumerable languages as threshold languages, as a direct consequence of their definability via valence automata. I will present some results, some of them a recasting of recent work from Goncharov/Milius/Silva (which focusses much more strongly on coalgebraic techniques) and some of them building further on this work, as well as some (hopefully interesting) open problems.