The Complexity of Translation Membership for Macro Tree Transducers

Macro tree transducers (mtts) are a useful formal model for XML query and transformation languages. In this paper one of the fundamental decision problems on translations, namely the “translation membership problem” is studied for mtts. For a fixed translation, the translation membership problem asks whether a given input/output pair is element of the translation. For call-by-name mtts this problem is shown to be NP-complete. The main result is that translation membership for call-by-value mtts is in polynomial time. For several extensions, such as addition of regular look-ahead or the generalization to multi-return mtts, it is shown that translation membership still remains in PTIME.