174 research outputs found
Two-Way Visibly Pushdown Automata and Transducers
Automata-logic connections are pillars of the theory of regular languages.
Such connections are harder to obtain for transducers, but important results
have been obtained recently for word-to-word transformations, showing that the
three following models are equivalent: deterministic two-way transducers,
monadic second-order (MSO) transducers, and deterministic one-way automata
equipped with a finite number of registers. Nested words are words with a
nesting structure, allowing to model unranked trees as their depth-first-search
linearisations. In this paper, we consider transformations from nested words to
words, allowing in particular to produce unranked trees if output words have a
nesting structure. The model of visibly pushdown transducers allows to describe
such transformations, and we propose a simple deterministic extension of this
model with two-way moves that has the following properties: i) it is a simple
computational model, that naturally has a good evaluation complexity; ii) it is
expressive: it subsumes nested word-to-word MSO transducers, and the exact
expressiveness of MSO transducers is recovered using a simple syntactic
restriction; iii) it has good algorithmic/closure properties: the model is
closed under composition with a unambiguous one-way letter-to-letter transducer
which gives closure under regular look-around, and has a decidable equivalence
problem
Programming Using Automata and Transducers
Automata, the simplest model of computation, have proven to be an effective tool in reasoning about programs that operate over strings. Transducers augment automata to produce outputs and have been used to model string and tree transformations such as natural language translations. The success of these models is primarily due to their closure properties and decidable procedures, but good properties come at the price of limited expressiveness. Concretely, most models only support finite alphabets and can only represent small classes of languages and transformations. We focus on addressing these limitations and bridge the gap between the theory of automata and transducers and complex real-world applications: Can we extend automata and transducer models to operate over structured and infinite alphabets? Can we design languages that hide the complexity of these formalisms? Can we define executable models that can process the input efficiently? First, we introduce succinct models of transducers that can operate over large alphabets and design BEX, a language for analysing string coders. We use BEX to prove the correctness of UTF and BASE64 encoders and decoders. Next, we develop a theory of tree transducers over infinite alphabets and design FAST, a language for analysing tree-manipulating programs. We use FAST to detect vulnerabilities in HTML sanitizers, check whether augmented reality taggers conflict, and optimize and analyze functional programs that operate over lists and trees. Finally, we focus on laying the foundations of stream processing of hierarchical data such as XML files and program traces. We introduce two new efficient and executable models that can process the input in a left-to-right linear pass: symbolic visibly pushdown automata and streaming tree transducers. Symbolic visibly pushdown automata are closed under Boolean operations and can specify and efficiently monitor complex properties for hierarchical structures over infinite alphabets. Streaming tree transducers can express and efficiently process complex XML transformations while enjoying decidable procedures
Determinacy and rewriting of functional topâdown and MSO tree transformations
A query is determined by a view, if the result of the query can be reconstructed from the result of the view. We consider the problem of deciding for two given (functional) tree transformations, whether one is determined by the other. If the view transformation is induced by a tree transducer that may copy, then determinacy is undecidable. For a large class of noncopying views, namely compositions of extended linear topâdown tree transducers, we show that determinacy is decidable, where queries are either deterministic topâdown tree transducers (with regular look-ahead) or deterministic MSO tree transducers. We also show that if a query is determined by a view, then it can be rewritten into a query that works over the view and is in the same class of transducers as the query. The proof relies on the decidability of equivalence for the considered classes of queries, and on their composition closure
Reducing Transducer Equivalence to Register Automata Problems Solved by "Hilbert Method"
In the past decades, classical results from algebra, including Hilbert\u27s Basis Theorem, had various applications in formal languages, including a proof of the Ehrenfeucht Conjecture, decidability of HDT0L sequence equivalence, and decidability of the equivalence problem for functional tree-to-string transducers.
In this paper, we study the scope of the algebraic methods mentioned above, particularily as applied to the functionality problem for register automata, and equivalence for functional register automata. We provide two results, one positive, one negative. The positive result is that functionality and equivalence are decidable for MSO transformations on unordered forests. The negative result comes from a try to extend this method to decide functionality and equivalence on macro tree transducers. We reduce macro tree transducers equivalence to an equivalence problem for some class of register automata naturally relevant to our method. We then prove this latter problem to be undecidable
Streamability of nested word transductions
We consider the problem of evaluating in streaming (i.e., in a single
left-to-right pass) a nested word transduction with a limited amount of memory.
A transduction T is said to be height bounded memory (HBM) if it can be
evaluated with a memory that depends only on the size of T and on the height of
the input word. We show that it is decidable in coNPTime for a nested word
transduction defined by a visibly pushdown transducer (VPT), if it is HBM. In
this case, the required amount of memory may depend exponentially on the height
of the word. We exhibit a sufficient, decidable condition for a VPT to be
evaluated with a memory that depends quadratically on the height of the word.
This condition defines a class of transductions that strictly contains all
determinizable VPTs
Multiple Context-Free Tree Grammars: Lexicalization and Characterization
Multiple (simple) context-free tree grammars are investigated, where "simple"
means "linear and nondeleting". Every multiple context-free tree grammar that
is finitely ambiguous can be lexicalized; i.e., it can be transformed into an
equivalent one (generating the same tree language) in which each rule of the
grammar contains a lexical symbol. Due to this transformation, the rank of the
nonterminals increases at most by 1, and the multiplicity (or fan-out) of the
grammar increases at most by the maximal rank of the lexical symbols; in
particular, the multiplicity does not increase when all lexical symbols have
rank 0. Multiple context-free tree grammars have the same tree generating power
as multi-component tree adjoining grammars (provided the latter can use a
root-marker). Moreover, every multi-component tree adjoining grammar that is
finitely ambiguous can be lexicalized. Multiple context-free tree grammars have
the same string generating power as multiple context-free (string) grammars and
polynomial time parsing algorithms. A tree language can be generated by a
multiple context-free tree grammar if and only if it is the image of a regular
tree language under a deterministic finite-copying macro tree transducer.
Multiple context-free tree grammars can be used as a synchronous translation
device.Comment: 78 pages, 13 figure
Equivalence Problems for Tree Transducers: A Brief Survey
The decidability of equivalence for three important classes of tree
transducers is discussed. Each class can be obtained as a natural restriction
of deterministic macro tree transducers (MTTs): (1) no context parameters,
i.e., top-down tree transducers, (2) linear size increase, i.e., MSO definable
tree transducers, and (3) monadic input and output ranked alphabets. For the
full class of MTTs, decidability of equivalence remains a long-standing open
problem.Comment: In Proceedings AFL 2014, arXiv:1405.527
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