The Equivalence of Bottom-Up and Top-Down Tree-to-Graph Transducers

Abstract

We introduce the bottom-up tree-to-graph transducer, which is very similar to the usual (total deterministic) bottom-up tree transducer except that it translates trees into hypergraphs rather than trees, using hypergraph substitution instead of tree substitution. If every output hypergraph of the transducer is a jungle, i.e., a hypergraph that can be unfolded into a tree, then the tree-to-graph transducer is said to be tree-generating and naturally defines a tree-to-tree translation. We prove that bottom-up tree-to-graph transducers define the same tree-to-tree translations as the previously introduced top-down tree-to-graph transducers. This is in contrast with the well-known incomparability of the usual bottom-up and top-down tree transducers.