On polynomial grammars extended with substitution

Abstract

We investigate decidability of equivalence of register transducers, also called copyful Streaming String Transducers in case of string input, extended with an operation of substituting a register for all occurrences of a given letter in another register. We reduce to zeroness of polynomial grammars (over ring of polynomials) extended with analogous substitution operation by encoding strings into polynomials; a similar method was used successfully by Seidl et al. in 2018. We give two restrictions under which register transducers with substitution have decidable equivalence. They seem to be very restrictive but on the other hand, they seem to be on the edge of the scope of this "polynomial" method, as in the third result we give a rather restricted model of polynomial grammars with substitution that has undecidable equivalence.