Two-Way Parikh Automata with a Visibly Pushdown Stack

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate the complexity of the emptiness problem for Parikh automata equipped with a pushdown stack. Pushdown Parikh automata extend pushdown automata with counters which can only be incremented and an acceptance condition given as a semi-linear set, which we represent as an existential Presburger formula over the final values of the counters. We show that the non-emptiness problem both in the deterministic and non-deterministic cases is NP-c. If the input head can move in a two-way fashion, emptiness gets undecidable, even if the pushdown stack is visibly and the automaton deterministic. We define a restriction, called the single-use restriction, to recover decidability in the presence of two-wayness, when the stack is visibly. This syntactic restriction enforces that any transition which increments at least one dimension is triggered only a bounded number of times per input position. Our main contribution is to show that non-emptiness of two-way visibly Parikh automata which are single-use is NExpTime-c. We finally give applications to decision problems for expressive transducer models from nested words to words, including the equivalence problem.