Tree pattern matching from regular tree expressions

summary:In this work we deal with tree pattern matching over ranked trees, where the pattern set to be matched against is defined by a regular tree expression. We present a new method that uses a tree automaton constructed inductively from a regular tree expression. First we construct a special tree automaton for the regular tree expression of the pattern $E$, which is somehow a generalization of Thompson automaton for strings. Then we run the constructed automaton on the subject tree $t$. The pattern matching algorithm requires an $\mathcal{O}(\vert t\vert\vert E\vert)$ time complexity, where $\vert t\vert$ is the number of nodes of $t$ and $\vert E\vert$ is the size of the regular tree expression $E$. The novelty of this contribution besides the low time complexity is that the set of patterns can be infinite, since we use regular tree expressions to represent patterns

Tree Template Matching in Ranked Ordered Trees by Pushdown Automata

AbstractWe consider the problem of tree template matching in ranked ordered trees, and propose a solution based on the bottom-up technique. Specifically, we transform the tree pattern matching problem to a string matching problem, by transforming the tree template and the subject tree to strings representing their postfix notation, and then use pushdown automata as the computational model. The method is analogous to the construction of string pattern matchers. The given tree template is preprocessed once, by constructing a nondeterministic pushdown automaton, which is then transformed to the equivalent deterministic one. Although we prove that the space required for preprocessing is exponential to the size of the tree template in the worst case, the space required for a specific class of tree templates is linear. The time required for the searching phase is linear to the size of the subject tree in both cases