Visibly pushdown transducers

Abstract

Visibly pushdown transducers (VPT ) extend visibly pushdown automata (VPA) with outputs. They read nested words, i.e. finite words on a structured alphabet partitioned into call, return and internal symbols, and produce output words, which are not necessarily nested. As for VPA, the behavior of the stack is synchronized with the types of input symbols: on reading a call symbol, exactly one stack symbol is pushed onto the stack; on reading a return symbol, exactly one stack symbol is popped from the stack; and the stack is untouched when reading internal symbols. Along their transitions VPT can append words on their output tape, whose concatenation define the resulting output word. Therefore VPT define transformations from nested words to words and can be seen as a subclass of pushdown transducers. In this paper, we study the algorithmic, closure and expressiveness properties of VPT.