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A Collapse of the Parity Index Hierarchy of Tree Automata, Based on Cantor-Bendixson Ranks

Authors Karoliina Lehtinen , Nathan Lhote

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ACM Subject Classification
  • Theory of computation → Formal languages and automata theory
Keywords
  • Parity tree automata
  • alternating automata
  • Cantor-Bendixson rank

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Abstract

Over words, nondeterministic Büchi automata and alternating weak automata are as expressive as parity automata with any number of priorities. Over trees, the Büchi acceptance condition is strictly weaker and the more priorities we allow, the more languages parity automata can recognise. We say that on words, the parity-index hierarchies of nondeterministic and alternating automata collapse to the Büchi and weak level, respectively, while both are infinite over trees.
We ask when is Büchi enough?, that is, on which classes of trees are nondeterministc Büchi automata as expressive as parity automata. Similarly for alternating weak automata. We work in the setting of unranked unordered trees, in which there is no order among the children of nodes.
We find that for nondeterministic and alternating automata, the parity-index hierarchy collapses to the Büchi level and weak level, respectively, for any class of trees of finitely bounded Cantor-Bendixson rank, a topological measure of tree complexity. Over trees of countable Cantor-Bendixson rank, (a.k.a. thin trees) the parity-index hierarchy of both nondeterministic and alternating automata collapses to the level [1,2,3], as was already known for ordered trees. These results are in some sense optimal: on the class of trees of finite but unbounded Cantor-Bendixson rank, two priorities do not suffice to recognise all parity-recognisable languages, even for alternating automata.

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Karoliina Lehtinen and Nathan Lhote. A Collapse of the Parity Index Hierarchy of Tree Automata, Based on Cantor-Bendixson Ranks. In 52nd International Colloquium on Automata, Languages, and Programming (ICALP 2025). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 334, pp. 164:1-164:20, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2025) https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.ICALP.2025.164

Author Details

Karoliina Lehtinen
  • CNRS, Aix-Marseille Université, LIS, France
Nathan Lhote
  • Aix-Marseille Université, LIS, France

References

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