Logical and Algebraic Characterizations of Rational Transductions

Rational word languages can be defined by several equivalent means: finite state automata, rational expressions, finite congruences, or monadic second-order (MSO) logic. The robust subclass of aperiodic languages is defined by: counter-free automata, star-free expressions, aperiodic (finite) congruences, or first-order (FO) logic. In particular, their algebraic characterization by aperiodic congruences allows to decide whether a regular language is aperiodic. We lift this decidability result to rational transductions, i.e., word-to-word functions defined by finite state transducers. In this context, logical and algebraic characterizations have also been proposed. Our main result is that one can decide if a rational transduction (given as a transducer) is in a given decidable congruence class. We also establish a transfer result from logic-algebra equivalences over languages to equivalences over transductions. As a consequence, it is decidable if a rational transduction is first-order definable, and we show that this problem is PSPACE-complete

The Equivalence Problem for Deterministic MSO Tree Transducers is Decidable

It is decidable for deterministic MSO definable graph-to-string or graph-to-tree transducers whether they are equivalent on a context-free set of graphs

Deciding Equivalence of Linear Tree-to-Word Transducers in Polynomial Time

We show that the equivalence of deterministic linear top-down tree-to-word transducers is decidable in polynomial time. Linear tree-to-word transducers are non-copying but not necessarily order-preserving and can be used to express XML and other document transformations. The result is based on a partial normal form that provides a basic characterization of the languages produced by linear tree-to-word transducers.Comment: short version of this paper will be published in the proceedings of the 20th Conference on Developments in Language Theory (DLT 2016), Montreal, Canad

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

On Equivalence and Uniformisation Problems for Finite Transducers

Transductions are binary relations of finite words. For rational transductions, i.e., transductions defined by finite transducers, the inclusion, equivalence and sequential uniformisation problems are known to be undecidable. In this paper, we investigate stronger variants of inclusion, equivalence and sequential uniformisation, based on a general notion of transducer resynchronisation, and show their decidability. We also investigate the classes of finite-valued rational transductions and deterministic rational transductions, which are known to have a decidable equivalence problem. We show that sequential uniformisation is also decidable for them

The many facets of string transducers

Regular word transductions extend the robust notion of regular languages from a qualitative to a quantitative reasoning. They were already considered in early papers of formal language theory, but turned out to be much more challenging. The last decade brought considerable research around various transducer models, aiming to achieve similar robustness as for automata and languages. In this paper we survey some older and more recent results on string transducers. We present classical connections between automata, logic and algebra extended to transducers, some genuine definability questions, and review approaches to the equivalence problem

Decision Problems for Origin-Close Top-Down Tree Transducers

Tree transductions are binary relations of finite trees. For tree transductions defined by non-deterministic top-down tree transducers, inclusion, equivalence and synthesis problems are known to be undecidable. Adding origin semantics to tree transductions, i.e., tagging each output node with the input node it originates from, is a known way to recover decidability for inclusion and equivalence. The origin semantics is rather rigid, in this work, we introduce a similarity measure for transducers with origin semantics and show that we can decide inclusion, equivalence and synthesis problems for origin-close non-deterministic top-down tree transducers