Matrix Interpretations for Proving Termination of Term Rewriting

We present a new method for automatically proving termination of term rewriting. It is based on the well-known idea of interpretation of terms where every rewrite step causes a decrease, but instead of the usual natural numbers we use vectors of natural numbers, ordered by a particular nontotal well-founded ordering. Function symbols are interpreted by linear mappings represented by matrices. This method allows us to prove termination and relative termination. A modification of the latter, in which strict steps are only allowed at the top, turns out to be helpful in combination with the dependency pair transformation. By bounding the dimension and the matrix coefficients, the search problem becomes finite. Our implementation transforms it to a Boolean satisfiability problem (SAT), to be solved by a state-of-the-art SAT solver.     

The undecidability of self-embedding for term rewriting systems

The self-embedding property of term rewriting systems is closely related to the uniform termination property, since a nonself-embedding term rewriting system is uniform terminating. The self-embedding property is shown to be undecidable and partially decidable. It follows that the nonself-embedding property is not partially decidable. This is true even for globally finite term rewriting systems. The same construction gives an easy alternate proof that uniform termination is undecidable in general and also for globally finite term rewriting systems. Also, the looping property is shown to be undecidable in the same way.     

Termination of term rewriting: interpretation and type elimination

We investigate proving termination of term rewriting systems by interpretation of terms in a well-founded monotone algebra. The well-known polynomial interpretations can be considered as a particular case in this framework. A classification of types of termination, including simple termination, is proposed based on properties in the semantic level. A transformation on term rewriting systems eliminating distributive rules is introduced. Using this distribution elimination a new termination proof of the system SUBST of Hardin and Laville (1986) is given. This system describes explicit substitution in λ-calculus.Another tool for proving termination is based on introduction and removal of type restrictions. A property of many-sorted term rewriting systems is called persistent if it is not affected by removing the corresponding typing restriction. Persistence turns out to be a generalization of direct sum modularity, but is more powerful for both proving confluence and termination. Termination is proved to be persistent for the class of term rewriting systems for which not both duplicating rules and collapsing rules occur, generalizing a similar result of Rusinowitch for modularity. This result has nice applications, in particular in undecidability proofs.     

An initial algebra approach to term rewriting systems with variable binders

We present an extension of first-order term rewriting systems. It involves variable binding in the term language. We develop systems called binding term rewriting systems (BTRSs) in a stepwise manner. First we present the term language, then formulate equational logic. Finally, we define rewriting systems. This development is novel because we follow the initial algebra approach in an extended notion of Σ-algebras in various functor categories. These are based on Fiore-Plotkin-Turi’s presheaf semantics of variable binding and Lüth-Ghani’s monadic semantics of term rewriting systems. We characterise the terms, equational logic and rewrite systems for BTRSs as initial algebras in suitable categories. Then, we show an important rewriting property of BTRSs: orthogonal BTRSs are confluent. Moreover, by using the initial algebra semantics, we give a complete characterisation of termination of BTRSs. Finally, we discuss our design choice of BTRSs from a semantic perspective. An erlier version appeared in Proc. Fifth ACM-SIGPLAN International Conference on Principles and Practice of Declarative Programming (PPDP2003).     

Decidability for Left-Linear Growing Term Rewriting Systems

A term rewriting system is called growing if each variable occurring on both the left-hand side and the right-hand side of a rewrite rule occurs at depth zero or one in the left-hand side. Jacquemard showed that the reachability and the sequentiality of linear (i.e., left-right-linear) growing term rewriting systems are decidable. In this paper we show that Jacquemard's result can be extended to left-linear growing rewriting systems that may have right-nonlinear rewrite rules. This implies that the reachability and the joinability of some class of right-linear term rewriting systems are decidable, which improves the results for right-ground term rewriting systems by Oyamaguchi. Our result extends the class of left-linear term rewriting systems having a decidable call-by-need normalizing strategy. Moreover, we prove that the termination property is decidable for almost orthogonal growing term rewriting systems.     

Term Rewriting with Type-safe Traversal Functions

Term rewriting is an appealing technique for performing program analysis and program transformation. Tree (term) traversal is frequently used but is not supported by standard term rewriting. In this paper, many-sorted first-order term rewriting is extended with automatic tree traversal by adding two primitive tree traversal strategies and complementing them with three types of traversals. These so-called traversal functions can be either top-down or bottom-up. They can be sort preserving, mapping to a single sort, or a combination of these two. Traversal functions have a simple design, their application is type-safe in a first-order many-sorted setting and can be implemented efficiently. We describe the operational semantics of traversal functions and discuss applications.     

Conditional Term Graph Rewriting with Indirect Sharing

For reasons of efficiency, term rewriting is usually implemented by term graph rewriting. In term rewriting, expressions are represented as terms, whereas in term graph rewriting these are represented as directed graphs. Unlike terms, graphs allow a sharing of common subexpressions. In previous work, we have shown that conditional term graph rewriting is a sound and complete implementation for a certain class of CTRSs with strict equality, provided that a minimal structure sharing scheme is used. In this paper, we will show that this is also true for two different extensions of normal CTRSs. In contrast to the previous work, however, a non-minimal structure sharing scheme can be used. That is, the amount of sharing is increased.     

Modular and Incremental Automated Termination Proofs

We propose a modular approach of term rewriting systems, making the best of their hierarchical structure. We definerewriting modules and then provide a new method to prove termination incrementally. We obtain new and powerful termination criteria for standard rewriting, thanks to the combination of dependency pairs and      

Characterizing and proving operational termination of deterministic conditional term rewriting systems

We investigate the practically crucial property of operational termination of deterministic conditional term rewriting systems (DCTRSs), an important declarative programming paradigm. We show that operational termination can be equivalently characterized by the newly introduced notion of context-sensitive quasi-reductivity. Based on this characterization and an unraveling transformation of DCTRSs into context-sensitive (unconditional) rewrite systems (CSRSs), context-sensitive quasi-reductivity of a DCTRS is shown to be equivalent to termination of the resulting CSRS on original terms (i.e., terms over the signature of the DCTRS). This result enables both proving and disproving operational termination of given DCTRSs via transformation into CSRSs. A concrete procedure for this restricted termination analysis (on original terms) is proposed and encouraging benchmarks obtained by the termination tool VMTL, that utilizes this approach, are presented. Finally, we show that the context-sensitive unraveling transformation is sound and complete for collapse-extended termination, thus solving an open problem of Duran et al. (2008) [10].     

Nominal rewriting

Nominal rewriting is based on the observation that if we add support for α-equivalence to first-order syntax using the nominal-set approach, then systems with binding, including higher-order reduction schemes such as λ-calculus beta-reduction, can be smoothly represented. Nominal rewriting maintains a strict distinction between variables of the object-language (atoms) and of the meta-language (variables or unknowns). Atoms may be bound by a special abstraction operation, but variables cannot be bound, giving the framework a pronounced first-order character, since substitution of terms for variables is not capture-avoiding. We show how good properties of first-order rewriting survive the extension, by giving an efficient rewriting algorithm, a critical pair lemma, and a confluence theorem for orthogonal systems.     

Mechanizing Weakly Ground Termination Proving of Term Rewriting Systems by Structural and Cover-Set Inductions

The paper presents three formal proving methods for generalized weakly ground terminating property, i.e., weakly terminating property in a restricted domain of a term rewriting system, one with structural induction, one with cover-set induction, and the third without induction, and describes their mechanization based on a meta-computation model for term rewriting systems-dynamic term rewriting calculus. The methods can be applied to non-terminating, non-confluent and/or non-left-linear term rewriting systems. They can do "forward proving" by applying propositions in the proof, as well as "backward proving" by discovering lemmas during the proof.     

Sufficient-completeness,ground-reducibility and their complexity

Summary The sufficient-completeness property of equational algebraic specifications has been found useful in providing guidelines for designing abstract data type specifications as well as in proving inductive properties using the induction-less-induction method. The sufficient-completeness property is known to be undecidable in general. In an earlier paper, it was shown to be decidable for constructor-preserving, complete (canonical) term rewriting systems, even when there are relations among constructor symbols. In this paper, the complexity of the sufficient-completeness property is analyzed for different classes of term rewriting systems. A number of results about the complexity of the sufficient-completeness property for complete (canonical) term rewriting systems are proved: (i) The problem is co-NP-complete for term rewriting systems with free constructors (i.e., no relations among constructors are allowed), (ii) the problem remains co-NP-complete for term rewriting systems with unary and nullary constructors, even when there are relations among constructors, (iii) the problem is provably in almost exponential time for left-linear term rewriting systems with relations among constructors, and (iv) for left-linear complete constructor-preserving rewriting systems, the problem can be decided in steps exponential innlogn wheren is the size of the rewriting system. No better lower-bound for the complexity of the sufficient-completeness property for complete (canonical) term rewriting system with nonlinear left-hand sides is known. An algorithm for left-linear complete constructor-preserving rewriting systems is also discussed. Finally, the sufficient-completeness property is shown to be undecidable for non-linear complete term rewriting systems with associative functions. These complexity results also apply to the ground-reducibility property (also called inductive-reducibility) which is known to be directly related to the sufficient-completeness property.Some of the results in this paper were reported in a paper titled Complexity of Sufficient-Completeness presented at theSixth Conf. on Foundations of Software Technology and Theoretical Computer Science, New Delhi, India, Dec. 1986. The term quasi-reducibility is replaced in this paper by ground-reducibility as the latter seems to convey a lot more about the concept than the former.Partially supported by the National Science Foundation Grant nos. CCR-8408461 and CCR-8906678Partially supported by the National Science Foundation Grant nos. CCR-8408461 and CCR-9009414Partially supported by the National Science Foundation Grant no. DCR-8603184     

On the decidability of termination of query evaluation in transitive-closure logics for polynomial constraint databases

The formalism of constraint databases, in which possibly infinite data sets are described by Boolean combinations of polynomial inequality and equality constraints, has its main application area in spatial databases. The standard query language for polynomial constraint databases is first-order logic over the reals. Because of the limited expressive power of this logic with respect to queries that are important in spatial data base applications, various extensions have been introduced. We study extensions of first-order logic with different types of transitive-closure operators and we are in particular interested in deciding the termination of the evaluation of queries expressible in these transitive-closure logics. It turns out that termination is undecidable in general. However, we show that the termination of the transitive closure of a continuous function graph in the two-dimensional plane, viewed as a binary relation over the reals, is decidable, and even expressible in first-order logic over the reals. Based on this result, we identify a particular transitive-closure logic for which termination of query evaluation is decidable and which is more expressive than first-order logic over the reals. Furthermore, we can define a guarded fragment in which exactly the terminating queries of this language are expressible.     

Proving termination of context-sensitive rewriting by transformation

Context-sensitive rewriting (CSR) is a restriction of rewriting that forbids reductions on selected arguments of functions. With CSR, we can achieve a terminating behavior with non-terminating term rewriting systems, by pruning (all) infinite rewrite sequences. Proving termination of CSR has been recently recognized as an interesting problem with several applications in the fields of term rewriting and programming languages. Several methods have been developed for proving termination of CSR. Specifically, a number of transformations that permit treating this problem as a standard termination problem have been described. The main goal of this paper is to contribute to a better comprehension and practical use of transformations for proving termination of CSR. We provide new completeness results regarding the use of the transformations in two restricted (but relevant) settings: (a) proofs of termination of canonical CSR and (b) proofs of termination of CSR by using transformations together with simplification orderings. We have also made an experimental evaluation of the transformations, which complements the theoretical analysis from a practical point of view. This leads to new hierarchies of the transformations which are useful to guide their practical use when implementing tools for proving termination of CSR.     

Four equivalent equivalences of reductions

Two co-initial reductions in a term rewriting system are said to be equivalent if they perform the same steps, albeit maybe in a different order. We present four characterisations of such a notion of equivalence, based on permutation, standardisation, labelling and projection, respectively. We prove that the characterisations all yield the same notion of equivalence, for the class of first-order left-linear term rewriting systems. A crucial rôle in our development is played by the notion of a proof term.     

Infinitary Combinatory Reduction Systems

We define infinitary Combinatory Reduction Systems (iCRSs), thus providing the first notion of infinitary higher-order rewriting. The systems defined are sufficiently general that ordinary infinitary term rewriting and infinitary λ-calculus are special cases.Furthermore, we generalise a number of known results from first-order infinitary rewriting and infinitary λ-calculus to iCRSs. In particular, for fully-extended, left-linear iCRSs we prove the well-known compression property, and for orthogonal iCRSs we prove that (1) if a set of redexes U has a complete development, then all complete developments of U end in the same term and that (2) any tiling diagram involving strongly convergent reductions S and T can be completed iff at least one of S/T and T/S is strongly convergent.We also prove an ancillary result of independent interest: a set of redexes in an orthogonal iCRS has a complete development iff the set has the so-called finite jumps property.     

Reducibility of operation symbols in term rewriting systems and its application to behavioral specifications

In this paper, we propose the notion of reducibility of symbols in term rewriting systems (TRSs). For a given algebraic specification, operation symbols can be classified on the basis of their denotations: the operation symbols for functions and those for constructors. In a model, each term constructed by using only constructors should denote an element, and functions are defined on sets formed by these elements. A term rewriting system provides operational semantics to an algebraic specification. Given a TRS, a term is called reducible if some rewrite rule can be applied to it. An irreducible term can be regarded as an answer in a sense. In this paper, we define the reducibility of operation symbols as follows: an operation symbol is reducible if any term containing the operation symbol is reducible. Non-trivial properties of context-sensitive rewriting, which is a simple restriction of rewriting, can be obtained by restricting the terms on the basis of variable occurrences, its sort, etc. We confirm the usefulness of the reducibility of operation symbols by applying them to behavioral specifications for proving the behavioral coherence property.     

Formal Proofs About Rewriting Using ACL2

We present an application of the ACL2 theorem prover to reason about rewrite systems theory. We describe the formalization and representation aspects of our work using the first-order, quantifier-free logic of ACL2 and we sketch some of the main points of the proof effort. First, we present a formalization of abstract reduction systems and then we show how this abstraction can be instantiated to establish results about term rewriting. The main theorems we mechanically proved are Newman's lemma (for abstract reductions) and Knuth–Bendix critical pair theorem (for term rewriting).     

Confluence and termination of fuzzy relations

Confluence and termination are essential properties connected to the idea of rewriting and substituting which appear in abstract rewriting systems. The aim of the present paper is to investigate confluence, termination, and related properties from the point of view of fuzzy logic leaving the ordinary notions a particular case when the underlying structure of truth degrees is two-valued Boolean algebra. The main motivation of this study is the fact that in several natural situations, the notion of substitutability is inherently fuzzy rather than crisp.     

On tree automata that certify termination of left-linear term rewriting systems

We present a new method for automatically proving termination of left-linear term rewriting systems on a given regular language of terms. It is a generalization of the match bound method for string rewriting. To prove that a term rewriting system terminates we first construct an enriched system over a new signature that simulates the original derivations. The enriched system is an infinite system over an infinite signature, but it is locally terminating: every restriction of the enriched system to a finite signature is terminating. We then construct iteratively a finite tree automaton that accepts the enriched given regular language and is closed under rewriting modulo the enriched system. If this procedure stops, then the enriched system is compact: every enriched derivation involves only a finite signature. Therefore, the original system terminates. We present two methods to construct the enrichment: roof heights for left-linear systems, and match heights for linear systems. For linear systems, the method is strengthened further by a forward closure construction. Using these methods, we give examples for automated termination proofs that cannot be obtained by standard methods.