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Abstract. AProVE 1.2 is one of the most powerful systems for automated termination proofs of term rewrite systems (TRSs). It is the first tool which automates the new dependency pair framework [8] and therefore permits a completely flexible combination of different termination proof techniques. Due to this framework, AProVE 1.2 is also the first termination prover which can be fully configured by the user. 1

Abstract. The dependency pair technique [1, 11, 12] is a powerful method for automated termination and innermost termination proofs of term rewrite systems (TRSs). For any TRS, it generates inequality constraints that have to be satisfied by well-founded orders. We improve the dependency pair technique by considerably reducing the number of constraints produced for (innermost) termination proofs. Moreover, we extend transformation techniques to manipulate dependency pairs which simplify (innermost) termination proofs significantly. In order to fully mechanize the approach, we show how transformations and the search for suitable orders can be mechanized efficiently. We implemented our results in the automated termination prover AProVE and evaluated them on large collections of examples.

Abstract. Developing automatable methods for proving termination of term rewrite systems that resist traditional techniques based on simplification orders has become an active research area in the past few years. The dependency pair method of Arts and Giesl is one of the most popular such methods. However, there are several obstacles that hamper its automation. In this paper we present new ideas to overcome these obstacles. We provide ample numerical data supporting our ideas. 1

Abstract. The dependency pair approach is one of the most powerful techniques for automated termination proofs of term rewrite systems. Up to now, it was regarded as one of several possible methods to prove termination. In this paper, we show that dependency pairs can instead be used as a general concept to integrate arbitrary techniques for termination analysis. In this way, the benefits of different techniques can be combined and their modularity and power are increased significantly. We refer to this new concept as the “dependency pair framework ” to distinguish it from the old “dependency pair approach”. Moreover, this framework facilitates the development of new methods for termination analysis. To demonstrate this, we present several new techniques within the dependency pair framework which simplify termination problems considerably. We implemented the dependency pair framework in our termination prover AProVE and evaluated it on large collections of examples. 1

We describe the system AProVE, an automated prover to verify (innermost) termination of term rewrite systems (TRSs). For this system, we have developed and implemented effcient algorithms based on classical simplification orders, dependency pairs, and the size-change principle. In particular, it contains many new improvements of the dependency pair approach that make automated termination proving more powerful and effcient. In AProVE, termination proofs can be performed with a user-friendly graphical interface and the system is currently among the most powerful termination provers available.

The dependency pair technique is a powerful modular method for automated termination proofs of term rewrite systems (TRSs). We present two important extensions of this technique: First, we show how to prove termination of higher-order functions using dependency pairs. To this end, the dependency pair technique is extended to handle (untyped) applicative TRSs. Second, we introduce a method to prove non-termination with dependency pairs, while up to now dependency pairs were only used to verify termination. Our results lead to a framework for combining termination and non-termination techniques for firstand higher-order functions in a very flexible way. We implemented and evaluated our results in the automated termination prover AProVE.

To simplify the task of proving termination of term rewriting systems, several elimination methods, such as the dummy elimination, the distribution elimination, the general dummy elimination and the improved general dummy elimination, have been proposed. In this paper, we show that the argument ltering method combining with the dependency pair technique is essential in all the above elimination methods. We present remarkable simple proofs for the soundness of these elimination methods based on this observation. Moreover, we propose a new elimination method, called the argument ltering transformation, which is not only more powerful than all the other elimination methods but also especially useful to make clear the essential relation hidden behind these methods.

Context-sensitive rewriting is a computational restriction of term rewriting used to model non-strict (lazy) evaluation in functional programming. The goal of this paper is the study and development of techniques to analyze the termination behavior of context-sensitive rewrite systems. For that purpose, several methods have been proposed in the literature which transform context-sensitive rewrite systems into ordinary rewrite systems such that termination of the transformed ordinary system implies termination of the original context-sensitive system. In this way, the huge variety of existing techniques for termination analysis of ordinary rewriting can be used for context-sensitive rewriting, too. We analyze the existing transformation techniques for proving termination of context-sensitive rewriting and we suggest two new transformations. Our first method is simple, sound, and more powerful than the previously proposed transformations. However, it is not complete, i.e., there are terminating context-sensitive rewrite systems that are transformed into non-terminating term rewrite systems. The second method that we present in this paper is both sound and complete. All these observations also hold for rewriting modulo associativity and commutativity.

Although theoretically it is very powerful, the semantic path ordering (SPO) is not so useful in practice, since its monotonicity has to be proved by hand for each concrete term rewrite system (TRS). In this paper we present a monotonic variation of SPO, called MSPO. It characterizes termination, i.e., a TRS is terminating if and only if its rules are included in some MSPO. Hence MSPO is a complete termination method. On the practical side, it can be easily automated using as ingredients standard interpretations and general-purpose orderings like RPO. This is shown to be a sufficiently powerful way to handle several non-trivial examples and to obtain methods like dummy elimination or dependency pairs as particular cases. Finally, we obtain some positive modularity results for termination based on MSPO. 1 Introduction Rewrite systems are sets of rules (directed equations) used to compute by repeatedly replacing parts of a given formula with equal ones until the simplest po...