The Joinability and Related Decision Problems for Semi-constructor TRSs

The word and unification problems for term rewriting systems (TRSs)are most important ones and their decision algorithms have various useful applications in computer science. Algorithms of deciding joinability for TRSs are often used to obtain algorithms that decide these problems. In this paper, we first show that the joinability problem is undecidable for linear semi-constructor TRSs. Here, a semi-constructor TRS is such a TRS that all defined symbols appearing in the right-hand side of each rewrite rule occur only in its ground subterms. Next, we show that this problem is decidable both for confluent semi-constructor TRSs and for confluent semi-monadic TRSs. This result implies that the word problem is decidable for these classes, and will be used to show that unification is decidable for confluent semi-constructor TRSs in our forthcoming paper.