When is a Bottom-Up Deterministic Tree Translation Top-Down Deterministic?

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 from the same class 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. The procedure relies on a precise abstract interpretation of inspection requirements and a dedicated earliest normal form 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 tree transducers, we obtain that it is decidable whether or not their translations can be realized by deterministic linear or uniform-copying top-down transducers without look-ahead (but with inspection) -- or without both look-ahead and inspection. Look-ahead removal has been known to be a notoriously difficult problem. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first to present look-ahead removal for natural and known subclasses of top-down tree transducers.