Tree pattern matching with a more general notion of occurrence of the pattern

Abstract

Since the initial paper of Hoffmann and O'Donnell [J. ACM 29 (1) (1982) 68–95], tree pattern matching has been studied by many authors. However, all the papers proposing algorithms for this problem deal with a restricted notion of pattern occurrence in the subject. In this note, we consider a more general notion of occurrence and we give an extension of the top-down algorithm of Hoffmann and O'Donnell for this notion.