Macro tree transducers (mtt) are an important model that both covers many
useful XML transformations and allows decidable exact typechecking. This paper
reports our first step toward an implementation of mtt typechecker that has a
practical efficiency. Our approach is to represent an input type obtained from
a backward inference as an alternating tree automaton, in a style similar to
Tozawa's XSLT0 typechecking. In this approach, typechecking reduces to checking
emptiness of an alternating tree automaton. We propose several optimizations
(Cartesian factorization, state partitioning) on the backward inference process
in order to produce much smaller alternating tree automata than the naive
algorithm, and we present our efficient algorithm for checking emptiness of
alternating tree automata, where we exploit the explicit representation of
alternation for local optimizations. Our preliminary experiments confirm that
our algorithm has a practical performance that can typecheck simple
transformations with respect to the full XHTML in a reasonable time