Nondeterministic Bimachines and Rational Relations with Finite Codomain

Bimachines are important conceptual tools used for the characterization of rational word functions (realized by single-valued transducers). Despite the attention received in the past, these sequential machines are far from being exhaustively studied. A natural question which has not been addressed so far is what family of transductions are realized by bimachines that operate nondeterministically. We show that these machines characterize input-unambiguous (IU) rational transductions, i.e., those transductions that can be written as a composition of rational functions and finite substitutions. Two more families of rational transductions are defined and related in a natural way to IU transductions: input-deterministic transductions and rational transductions with finite codomain (FC). We have shown that FC transductions are recognizable and that they can be expressed as finite union of subsequential functions. Moreover, they can be realized by nondeterministic bimachines. Finally, we have...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2006
• Where: FUIN
• Authors: Nicolae Santean, Sheng Yu
• Keywords: FUIN 2006, Important Conceptual Tools, Rational Transductions, Rational Word Functions