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

Streaming Tree Transducers

Theory of tree transducers provides a foundation for understanding expressiveness and complexity of analysis problems for specification languages for transforming hierarchically structured data such as XML documents. We introduce streaming tree transducers as an analyzable, executable, and expressive model for transforming unranked ordered trees in a single pass. Given a linear encoding of the input tree, the transducer makes a single left-to-right pass through the input, and computes the output in linear time using a finite-state control, a visibly pushdown stack, and a finite number of variables that store output chunks that can be combined using the operations of string-concatenation and tree-insertion. We prove that the expressiveness of the model coincides with transductions definable using monadic second-order logic (MSO). Existing models of tree transducers either cannot implement all MSO-definable transformations, or require regular look ahead that prohibits single-pass implementation. We show a variety of analysis problems such as type-checking and checking functional equivalence are solvable for our model.Comment: 40 page

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

Monotonicity and Persistence in Preferential Logics

An important characteristic of many logics for Artificial Intelligence is their nonmonotonicity. This means that adding a formula to the premises can invalidate some of the consequences. There may, however, exist formulae that can always be safely added to the premises without destroying any of the consequences: we say they respect monotonicity. Also, there may be formulae that, when they are a consequence, can not be invalidated when adding any formula to the premises: we call them conservative. We study these two classes of formulae for preferential logics, and show that they are closely linked to the formulae whose truth-value is preserved along the (preferential) ordering. We will consider some preferential logics for illustration, and prove syntactic characterization results for them. The results in this paper may improve the efficiency of theorem provers for preferential logics.Comment: See http://www.jair.org/ for any accompanying file

On Functionality of Visibly Pushdown Transducers

Visibly pushdown transducers form a subclass of pushdown transducers that (strictly) extends finite state transducers with a stack. Like visibly pushdown automata, the input symbols determine the stack operations. In this paper, we prove that functionality is decidable in PSpace for visibly pushdown transducers. The proof is done via a pumping argument: if a word with two outputs has a sufficiently large nesting depth, there exists a nested word with two outputs whose nesting depth is strictly smaller. The proof uses technics of word combinatorics. As a consequence of decidability of functionality, we also show that equivalence of functional visibly pushdown transducers is Exptime-Complete.Comment: 20 page

Determinacy and rewriting of functional top–down 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 top–down tree transducers, we show that determinacy is decidable, where queries are either deterministic top–down 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

Equivalence of Symbolic Tree Transducers

International audienceSymbolic tree transducers are programs by which to transform data trees with an infinite signature. In this paper, we show that the equivalence problem of symbolic top-down deterministic tree transducers (DTops) can be reduced to that of classical DTops. As a consequence the equivalence of two symbolic DTops can be decided in NExpTime, when assuming that all operations related to the processing of data values are in PTime. This results can be extended to symbolic DTops with lookahead and thus to symbolic bottom-up deterministic tree transducers

Aperiodic String Transducers

Regular string-to-string functions enjoy a nice triple characterization through deterministic two-way transducers (2DFT), streaming string transducers (SST) and MSO definable functions. This result has recently been lifted to FO definable functions, with equivalent representations by means of aperiodic 2DFT and aperiodic 1-bounded SST, extending a well-known result on regular languages. In this paper, we give three direct transformations: i) from 1-bounded SST to 2DFT, ii) from 2DFT to copyless SST, and iii) from k-bounded to 1-bounded SST. We give the complexity of each construction and also prove that they preserve the aperiodicity of transducers. As corollaries, we obtain that FO definable string-to-string functions are equivalent to SST whose transition monoid is finite and aperiodic, and to aperiodic copyless SST