Deciding semantic finiteness of pushdown processes and first-order grammars w.r.t. bisimulation equivalence

Abstract The problem if a given configuration of a pushdown automaton (PDA) is bisimilar with some (unspecified) finite-state process is shown to be decidable. The decidability is proven in the framework of first-order grammars, which are given by finite sets of labelled rules that rewrite roots of first-order terms. The framework is equivalent to PDA where also deterministic (i.e. alternative-free) epsilon-steps are allowed, hence to the model for which Senizergues showed an involved procedure deciding bisimilarity (1998, 2005). Such a procedure is here used as a black-box part of the algorithm. The result extends the decidability of the regularity problem for deterministic PDA that was shown by Stearns (1967), and later improved by Valiant (1975) regarding the complexity. The decidability question for nondeterministic PDA, answered positively here, had been open (as indicated, e.g., by Broadbent and Goller, 2012).