The solutions of two star-height problems for regular trees (Q760212)

Regular trees can be defined by two types of rational expressions. For these two types we solve the star-height problem, i.e., we show how to construct a rational expression of minimal star-height from the minimal graph of the given tree (i.e., the analogue of the minimal deterministic automaton for regular languages). In one case, the minimal star-height is the rank (in the sense of Eggan) of the minimal graph. There corresponds a characterization of the star-height of a prefix-free regular language w.r.t. rational expressions of a special kind (called deterministic) as the rank of its minimal deterministic automaton considered as a graph.