We generalize the contraction method, originally proposed by Elgot
and Rabin and later extended by Carton and Thomas, from labeled
linear orderings to deterministic colored trees. We introduce a suitable
notion of indistinguishability of trees with respect to tree automata
and we take advantage of compositional properties of trees to reduce a
number of instances of the acceptance problem for tree auotomata to
simple instances involving regular trees. We prove that such a method
works effectively for a large class of trees, which is closed under
noticeable operations and includes all deterministic trees in the
Caucal hierarchy as well as several trees outside it.
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