Narrowing Trees for Syntactically Deterministic Conditional Term Rewriting Systems

Abstract

A narrowing tree for a constructor term rewriting system and a pair of terms is a finite representation for the space of all possible innermost-narrowing derivations that start with the pair and end with non-narrowable terms. Narrowing trees have grammar representations that can be considered regular tree grammars. Innermost narrowing is a counterpart of constructor-based rewriting, and thus, narrowing trees can be used in analyzing constructor-based rewriting to normal forms. In this paper, using grammar representations, we extend narrowing trees to syntactically deterministic conditional term rewriting systems that are constructor systems. We show that narrowing trees are useful to prove two properties of a normal conditional term rewriting system: one is infeasibility of conditional critical pairs and the other is quasi-reducibility