Error-Correcting Tree Automata for Syntactic Pattern Recognition

Abstract

The syntax errors on trees are defined in terms of five types of error transformations, namely, substitution, stretch, split, branch, and deletion. The distance between two trees is the least cost sequence of error transformations needed to transform one to the other. Based on this definition, a class of error-correcting tree automata (ECTA) is proposed. The operation of ECTA is illustrated by a character recognition example.