If one concentrates only on dependency management, Maven and Ivy are tools with a similar mission, but quite different implementations.
I don't believe that regular expression exclusions are supported by Maven, although it appears some form of wildcard support was added in version 3, See MNG-3832
My advice is to adopt the simplest solution possible, so just explicitly list the dependencies you don't want:
<dependency>
<groupId>pmd</groupId>
<artifactId>pmd</artifactId>
<version>4.2.5</version>
<exclusions>
<exclusion>
<groupId>*</groupId>
<artifactId>xom</artifactId>
</exclusion>
<exclusion>
<groupId>*</groupId>
<artifactId>xml-apis</artifactId>
</exclusion>
<exclusion>
<groupId>*</groupId>
<artifactId>jdom</artifactId>
</exclusion>
..
..
</exclusions>
</dependency>
Configuration mapping is very tricky to translate, because the concept does not exist in Maven. Maven has a fixed number of "scopes" whereas configurations are often used to simulate scopes, but are not as limited. For more background infomration I recommend