A Fast Decision Procedure For Uniqueness of Normal Forms w.r.t. Conversion of Shallow Term Rewriting Systems

Abstract

Uniqueness of normal forms w.r.t. conversion (UNC) of term rewriting systems (TRSs) guarantees that there are no distinct convertible normal forms. It was recently shown that the UNC property of TRSs is decidable for shallow TRSs (Radcliffe et al., 2010). The existing procedure mainly consists of testing whether there exists a counterexample in a finite set of candidates; however, the procedure suffers a bottleneck of having a sheer number of such candidates. In this paper, we propose a new procedure which consists of checking a smaller number of such candidates and enumerating such candidates more efficiently. Correctness of the proposed procedure is proved and its complexity is analyzed. Furthermore, these two procedures have been implemented and it is experimentally confirmed that the proposed procedure runs much faster than the existing procedure