The No Endmarker Theorem for One-Way Probabilistic Pushdown Automata

Abstract

In various models of one-way pushdown automata, the explicit use of two designated endmarkers on a read-once input tape has proven to be extremely useful for making a conscious, final decision on the acceptance/rejection of each input word immediately after reading the right endmarker. With no endmarkers, by contrast, a machine must constantly stay in either accepting or rejecting states at any moment since it never notices the end of the input word. This situation, however, helps us analyze the behavior of the machine whose tape head makes the consecutive moves on all prefixes of a given extremely long input word. Since those two machine formulations have their own advantages, it is natural to ask whether the endmarkers are truly necessary to correctly recognize languages. In the deterministic and nondeterministic models, it is well-known that the endmarkers are removable without changing the acceptance criteria of each input word. This paper proves that, for a more general model of one-way probabilistic pushdown automata, the endmarkers are always removable. This is proven by employing probabilistic transformations from an "endmarker" machine to an equivalent "no-endmarker" machine at the cost of double exponential stack-state complexity without compromising its error probability. By setting this error probability appropriately, our proof also provides an alternative proof to both the deterministic and the nondeterministic models as well.