Lower bounds for the size of deterministic unranked tree automata

Tree automata operating on unranked trees use regular languages, called horizontal languages, to define the transitions of the vertical states that define the bottom-up computation of the automaton. It is well known that the deterministic tree automaton with smallest total number of states, that is, number of vertical states and number of states used to define the horizontal languages, is not unique and it is hard to establish lower bounds for the total number of states. By relying on existing bounds for the size of unambiguous finite automata, we give a lower bound for the size blow-up of determinizing a nondeterministic unranked tree automaton. The lower bound improves the earlier known lower bound that was based on an ad hoc construction. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.