English

Origin-equivalence of two-way word transducers is in PSPACE

Formal Languages and Automata Theory 2018-10-08 v3

Abstract

We consider equivalence and containment problems for word transductions. These problems are known to be undecidable when the transductions are relations between words realized by non-deterministic transducers, and become decidable when restricting to functions from words to words. Here we prove that decidability can be equally recovered by adopting a slightly different, but natural semantics, called origin semantics and introduced by Bojanczyk in 2014. Specifically, we prove that the equivalence and containment problems for two-way word transducers in the origin semantics are PSPACE-complete. We also consider a variant of the containment problem where two-way transducers are compared under the origin semantics, but in a more relaxed way, by allowing distortions of the origins. The possible distortions are described by means of a resynchronization relation. We propose a logical formalism for describing a broad class of resynchronizations, while preserving the decidability of the variant of the containment problem.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1807.08053,
  title  = {Origin-equivalence of two-way word transducers is in PSPACE},
  author = {Sougata Bose and Anca Muscholl and Vincent Penelle and Gabriele Puppis},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1807.08053},
  year   = {2018}
}