Jürgen Giesl

Termination of term rewriting using dependency pairs

We present techniques to prove termination and innermost termination of term rewriting systems automatically. In contrast to previous approaches, we do not compare left- and right-hand sides of rewrite rules, but introduce the notion of dependency pairs to compare left-hand sides with special subterms of the right-hand sides. This results in a technique which allows to apply existing methods for automated termination proofs to term rewriting systems where they failed up to now. In particular, there are numerous term rewriting systems where a direct termination proof with simplification orderings is not possible, but in combination with our technique, well-known simplification orderings (such as the recursive path ordering, polynomial orderings, or the Knuth–Bendix ordering) can now be used to prove termination automatically. Unlike previous methods, our technique for proving innermost termination automatically can also be applied to prove innermost termination of term rewriting systems that are not terminating. Moreover, as innermost termination implies termination for certain classes of term rewriting systems, this technique can also be used for termination proofs of such systems.

Mechanizing and Improving Dependency Pairs

The dependency pair technique is a powerful method for automated termination and innermost termination proofs of term rewrite systems (TRSs). For any TRS, it generates inequality constraints that have to be satisfied by well-founded orders. We improve the dependency pair technique by considerably reducing the number of constraints produced for (innermost) termination proofs. Moreover, we extend transformation techniques to manipulate dependency pairs that simplify (innermost) termination proofs significantly. To fully mechanize the approach, we show how transformations and the search for suitable orders can be mechanized efficiently. We implemented our results in the automated termination prover AProVE and evaluated them on large collections of examples.

AProVE 1.2: automatic termination proofs in the dependency pair framework

AProVE 1.2 is one of the most powerful systems for automated termination proofs of term rewrite systems (TRSs). It is the first tool which automates the new dependency pair framework [8] and therefore permits a completely flexible combination of different termination proof techniques. Due to this framework, AProVE 1.2 is also the first termination prover which can be fully configured by the user.

Automated Termination Proofs with AProVE

We describe the system ProVE, an automated prover to verify (innermost) termination of term rewrite systems (TRSs). For this system, we have developed and implemented efficient algorithms based on classical simplification orders, dependency pairs, and the size-change principle. In particular, it contains many new improvements of the dependency pair approach that make automated termination proving more powerful and efficient. In ProVE, termination proofs can be performed with a user-friendly graphical interface and the system is currently among the most powerful termination provers available.

The Dependency Pair Framework: Combining Techniques for Automated Termination Proofs

The dependency pair approach is one of the most powerful techniques for automated termination proofs of term rewrite systems. Up to now, it was regarded as one of several possible methods to prove termination. In this paper, we show that dependency pairs can instead be used as a general concept to integrate arbitrary techniques for termination analysis. In this way, the benefits of different techniques can be combined and their modularity and power are increased significantly. We[2] refer to this new concept as the “dependency pair framework” to distinguish it from the old “dependency pair approach”. Moreover, this framework facilitates the development of new methods for termination analysis. To demonstrate this, we present several new techniques within the dependency pair framework which simplify termination problems considerably. We implemented the dependency pair framework in our termination prover AProVE and evaluated it on large collections of examples.

SAT solving for termination analysis with polynomial interpretations

Polynomial interpretations are one of the most popular techniques for automated termination analysis and the search for such interpretations is a main bottleneck in most termination provers. We show that one can obtain speedups in orders of magnitude by encoding this task as a SAT problem and by applying modern SAT solvers.

Modular Termination Proofs for Rewriting Using Dependency Pairs

Recently, Arts and Giesl developed the dependency pair approach which allows automated termination and innermost termination proofs for many term rewriting systems (TRSs) for which such proofs were not possible before. The motivation for this approach was that virtually all previous techniques for automated termination proofs of TRSs were based on simplification orderings. In practice, however, many rewrite systems are not simply terminating, i.e. their termination cannot be verified by any simplification ordering. In this paper we introduce a refinement of the dependency pair framework which further extends the class of TRSs for which termination or innermost termination can be shown automatically. By means of this refinement, one can now prove termination in a modular way. Thus, this refinement is inevitable in order to verify the termination of large rewrite systems occurring in practice. To be more precise, one may use several different orderings in one termination proof. Subsequently, we present several new modularity results based on dependency pairs. First, we show that the well-known modularity of simple termination for disjoint unions can be extended to DP quasi-simple termination, i.e. to the class of rewrite systems where termination can be shown automatically by the dependency pair technique in combination with quasi-simplification orderings. Under certain additional conditions, this new result also holds for constructor-sharing and composable systems. Second, the above-mentioned refinement of the dependency pair method yields new modularity criteria for innermost termination which extend previous results in this area considerably. In particular, existing results for modularity of innermost termination can easily be shown to be direct consequences of our new criteria.

Automated termination analysis for Haskell: from term rewriting to programming languages

There are many powerful techniques for automated termination analysis of term rewriting. However, up to now they have hardly been used for real programming languages. We present a new approach which permits the application of existing techniques from term rewriting in order to prove termination of programs in the functional language Haskell. In particular, we show how termination techniques for ordinary rewriting can be used to handle those features of Haskell which are missing in term rewriting (e.g., lazy evaluation, polymorphic types, and higher-order functions). We implemented our results in the termination prover AProVE and successfully evaluated them on existing Haskell-libraries.

Transformation techniques for context-sensitive rewrite systems

Context-sensitive rewriting is a computational restriction of term rewriting used to model non-strict (lazy) evaluation in functional programming. The goal of this paper is the study and development of techniques to analyze the termination behavior of context-sensitive rewrite systems. For that purpose, several methods have been proposed in the literature which transform context-sensitive rewrite systems into ordinary rewrite systems such that termination of the transformed ordinary system implies termination of the original context-sensitive system. In this way, the huge variety of existing techniques for termination analysis of ordinary rewriting can be used for context-sensitive rewriting, too. We analyze the existing transformation techniques for proving termination of context-sensitive rewriting and we suggest two new transformations. Our first method is simple, sound, and more powerful than the previously proposed transformations. However, it is not complete, i.e., there are terminating context-sensitive rewrite systems that are transformed into non-terminating term rewrite systems. The second method that we present in this paper is both sound and complete. All these observations also hold for rewriting modulo associativity and commutativity.

Generating Polynomial Orderings for Termination Proofs

Most systems for the automation of termination proofs using polynomial orderings are only semi-automatic, i.e. the “right” polynomial ordering has to be given by the user. We show that a variation of Lank-fords partial derivative technique leads to an easier and slightly more powerful method than most other semi-automatic approaches. Based on this technique we develop a method for the automated synthesis of a suited polynomial ordering.