State complexity of regular tree languages for tree pattern matching

Abstract

We study the state complexity of regular tree languages for tree matching problem. Given a tree t and a set of pattern trees L, we can decide whether or not there exists a subtree occurrence of trees in L from the tree t by considering the new language L′ which accepts all trees containing trees in L as subtrees. We consider the case when we are given a set of pattern trees as a regular tree language and investigate the state complexity. Based on the sequential and parallel tree concatenation, we define three types of tree languages for deciding the existence of different types of subtree occurrences. We also study the deterministic top-down state complexity of path-closed languages for the same problem. © 2014 Springer International Publishing.