Abstract:
We consider two natural subclasses of deterministic top-down tree-to-tree transducers, namely, linear and uniform-copying transducers. For both classes we show that it is decidable whether the translation of a transducer with look-ahead can be realized by a transducer without look-ahead. The transducers constructed in this way, may still make use of inspection, i.e., have an additional tree automaton restricting the domain. We provide a second procedure which decides whether inspection can be removed and if so, constructs an equivalent transducer without inspection. The construction relies on a fixpoint algorithm that determines inspection requirements and on dedicated earliest normal forms for linear as well as uniform-copying transducers which can be constructed in polynomial time. As a consequence, equivalence of these transducers can be decided in polynomial time. Applying these results to deterministic bottom-up transducers, we obtain that it is decidable whether or not their translations can be realized by deterministic uniform-copying top-down transducers without look-ahead (but with inspection) - or without both look-ahead and inspection.
