2006

  1. Matrix Interpretations for Proving Termination of Term Rewriting
    Jörg Endrullis, Johannes Waldmann, and Hans Zantema
    In: Proc. Int. Joint Conf. on Automated Reasoning (IJCAR 2006), pp. 574–588, Springer (2006)
    paper

    Summary

    We present a new method for automatically proving termination of term rewriting using matrix interpretation (weighted automata with natural numbers as weights). 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 non-total well-founded ordering. Function symbols are interpreted by linear mappings represented by matrices. This method allows 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. Our implementation performs well on the Termination Problem Data Base: better than 5 out of 6 tools that participated in the 2005 termination competition in the category of term rewriting.

    An extended journal version of this paper is available from Matrix Interpretations for Proving Termination of Term Rewriting (Journal of Automated Reasoning 2008).

    See research for an overview of my research on termination.

    Bibtex

    @inproceedings{termination:matrix:2006,
  author = {Endrullis, J\"{o}rg and Waldmann, Johannes and Zantema, Hans},
  title = {{Matrix Interpretations for Proving Termination of Term Rewriting}},
  booktitle = {Proc.\ Int.\ Joint Conf.\ on Automated Reasoning (IJCAR~2006)},
  volume = {4130},
  pages = {574--588},
  publisher = {Springer},
  series = {LNCS},
  year = {2006},
  doi = {10.1007/11814771\_47},
  keywords = {rewriting, termination, automata},
  type = {conference}
}

    Digital Object Identifier

    10.1007/11814771_47
  2. Decomposing Terminating Rewrite Relations
    Jörg Endrullis, Dieter Hofbauer, and Johannes Waldmann
    In: Proc. Workshop on Termination (WST 2006), pp. 39–43 (2006)
    paper

    Summary

    In this paper we are concerned with automatically proving termination of string rewriting systems (or word rewriting systems). We introduce an efficient technique for constructing automata that serve as certificates of match-boundedness, and thereby termination. Previously constructions have either been inefficient or incomplete:

    • Match-Bounded String Rewriting Systems by Alfons Geser, Dieter Hofbauer and Johannes Waldmann. The construction in this paper is complete but very inefficient.
    • On tree automata that certify termination of left-linear term rewriting systems by Alfons Geser, Dieter Hofbauer, Johannes Waldmann and Hans Zantema. The construction in this paper is efficient but incomplete.
      • We present the first automata construction for matchbounded string rewriting that is both efficient and complete. Here completenss means that the algorithm always terminates if the system is matchbounded.

    See research for an overview of my research on termination.

    Bibtex

    @inproceedings{termination:matchbounds:2006,
  author = {Endrullis, J\"{o}rg and Hofbauer, Dieter and Waldmann, Johannes},
  title = {{Decomposing Terminating Rewrite Relations}},
  booktitle = {Proc.\ Workshop on Termination (WST~2006)},
  pages = {39--43},
  year = {2006},
  keywords = {rewriting, termination, automata},
  type = {workshop}
}

    Digital Object Identifier