A Unifying Approach for Multistack Pushdown Automata

We give a general approach to show the closure under complement and decide the emptiness for many classes of multistack visibly pushdown automata (Mvpa). A central notion in our approach is the visibly path-tree, i.e., a stack tree with the encoding of a path that denotes a linear ordering of the nodes. We show that the set of all such trees with a bounded size labeling is regular, and path-trees allow us to design simple conversions between tree automata and Mvpa’s. As corollaries of our results we get the closure under complement of ordered Mvpa that was an open problem, and a better upper bound on the algorithm to check the emptiness of bounded-phase Mvpa’s.