Regular Tree Automata

In my quest to understand the theory of recursive types in more detail, the notion of regular tree languages and [[Tree automaton|Tree Automata]] has cropped up.  These have been used, amongst other things, for describing [[XML schema|XML schemas]].  They are also useful for describing recursive types as well!

A nice example of a regular tree language is one for minimising boolean expressions.  The  constructors of the language are True, False, Not/1, And/2 and Or/2. The regular tree language looks thus:

Expr -> True
     | False
     | Not(Expr)
     | And(Expr,Expr)

This should look pretty familiar to anyone who’s studied context-free and/or regular languages before.  A simple (deterministic) bottom-up tree automata can then be defined using the following state transitions:

True --> q1            Not(q0) --> q1
False --> q0           Not(q1) --> q0
And(q0,q0) --> q0      And(q1,q0) --> q0
And(q0,q1) --> q0      And(q1,q1) --> q1

I guess the interesting question is how this differs from general regular languages.  They appear to be very similar — for example, they support minimisation, intersection and union (amongst other things).  Likewise, the relationship with context-free grammar is interesting … although I haven’t got to the bottom of that yet.

Anyway, a good reference on this subject is the book Tree Automata Techniques and Applications.

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