Matching and embedding through edit-union of trees

Abstract

This paper investigates a technique to extend the tree edit distance framework to allow the simultaneous matching of multiple tree structures. This approach extends a previous result that showed the edit distance between two trees is completely determined by the maximum tree obtained from both tree with node removal operations only. In our approach we seek the minimum structure from which we can obtain the original trees with removal operations. This structure has the added advantage that it can be extended to more than two trees and it imposes consistency on node matches throughout the matched trees. Furthermore through this structure we can get a “natural” embedding space of tree structures that can be used to analyze how tree representations vary in our problem domain.