RWS-Diff
Jan Finis, Martin Raiber, Nikolaus Augsten, Robert Brunel, Alfons Kemper, Franz Färber · 2013
The problem of generating a cost-minimal edit script between two trees has many important applications. However, finding such a cost-minimal script is computationally hard, thus the only methods that scale are approximate ones. Various approximate solutions have been proposed recently. However, most of them still show quadratic or worse runtime complexity in the tree size and thus do not scale well either. The only solutions with log-linear runtime complexity use simple matching algorithms that only find corresponding subtrees as long as these subtrees are equal. Consequently, such solutions are not robust at all, since small changes in the leaves which occur frequently can make all subtrees that contain the changed leaves unequal and thus prevent the matching of large portions of the trees. This problem could be avoided by searching for similar instead of equal subtrees but current similarity approaches are too costly and thus also show quadratic complexity. Hence, currently no robust log-linear method exists.