Abstract

We define a weighted monadic second order logic for trees where the weights are taken from a commutative semiring. We prove that a restricted version of this logic characterizes the class of formal tree series which are accepted by weighted bottom-up finite state tree automata. The restriction on the logic can be dropped if additionally the semiring is locally finite. This generalizes corresponding classical results of Thatcher, Wright, and Doner for tree languages and it extends recent results of Droste and Gastin [Weighted automata and weighted logics, in: Automata, Languages and Programming—32nd International Colloquium, ICALP 2005, Lisbon, Portugal, 2005, Proceedings, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 3580, Springer, Berlin, 2005, pp. 513–525, full version in Theoretical Computer Science, to appear.] from formal power series on words to formal tree series.

Keywords: Weighted automata; Tree automata; MSO-logics; Formal power series