Automata and Logic on Trees

This is the homepage of the course "Automata and Logic on Trees" given at the 19th European Summer School on Logic, Language and Information in Dublin, Ireland from 6-11 august 2007 by Wim Martens and Stijn Vansummeren.

Abstract

Regular languages are a fundamental concept in Computer Science. However, as undergraduate courses usually do not go beyond regular languages over strings, the elegant generalisation to regular tree languages is less known. Nevertheless, regular tree languages have become highly relevant for XML-related research. Indeed, finite automata for tree languages serve as a formal model of XML schema languages such as XML Schema, and their computational properties form the basis of many static analysis algorithms. The logical counterpart of finite automata over trees is Monadic Second Order logic (MSO). This connection allows to infer, e.g., closure properties and decidability of many decision problems. We provide a rigorous introduction to tree automata and their logical counterpart. In particular, we treat ranked tree automata, constructions on automata, closure properties, complexity of decision problems, MSO on trees, its correspondence to tree automata, unranked tree automata, and their application to XML.

Slides of Lectures

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