 
Deciding Confluence of Certain Term Rewriting Systems
in Polynomial Time
Ashish Tiwari
To appear in 
 LICS 2002, 
which is being held as part of
 FLoC 2002, 
Copenhagen, Denmark, July 20--Aug 1, 2002.
Abstract
We present  a polynomial time algorithm for  deciding confluence of
ground term rewrite systems.  We generalize the  decision procedure
to get a polynomial time algorithm, assuming that the maximum arity 
of a symbol in the signature is a constant, for deciding confluence 
of rewrite systems  where each rule contains a  shallow linear term 
on one side  and  a ground term  on the other.  The  existence of a 
polynomial time algorithm for deciding confluence of ground rewrite 
systems was open for a long time  and was independently solved only 
recently by Comon, Godoy, and Nieuwenhuis [FoCS 2001]. Our decision 
procedure is based on  the concepts of  abstract congruence closure
and abstract rewrite closure, which have been described by Bachmair
and Tiwari [CADE 2000] and Tiwari [FSTTCS 2001], respectively.
 pdf
 pdf
See also 
the journal version of this paper (co-authored with Godoy and Nieuwenhuis):
click here.
Slides
 pdf
BibTeX Entry
@inproceedings{Tiwari02:FLoC,
	TITLE = {Deciding Confluence of Certain Term Rewriting Systems in Polynomial Time},
	AUTHOR = {A. Tiwari},
	BOOKTITLE = {{IEEE} Symposium on Logic in Computer Science, LICS 2002},
	EDITOR = {Gordon Plotkin},
	PAGES = {447--456},
	PUBLISHER = {IEEE Society},
	MONTH = July,
	YEAR = 2002
}
 
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