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

Abstract

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