  We give a method to prove confluence of term rewriting systems that contain
non-terminating rewrite rules such as commutativity and associativity. Usually,
confluence of term rewriting systems containing such rules is proved by
treating them as equational term rewriting systems and considering E-critical
pairs and/or termination modulo E. In contrast, our method is based solely on
usual critical pairs and it also (partially) works even if the system is not
terminating modulo E. We first present confluence criteria for term rewriting
systems whose rewrite rules can be partitioned into a terminating part and a
possibly non-terminating part. We then give a reduction-preserving completion
procedure so that the applicability of the criteria is enhanced. In contrast to
the well-known Knuth-Bendix completion procedure which preserves the
equivalence relation of the system, our completion procedure preserves the
reduction relation of the system, by which confluence of the original system is
inferred from that of the completed system.
