NWA Bibliography

OpenNWA itself

OpenNWA applications

NWA fundamentals and external references

The fundamentals of NWAs were worked out by Alur and Madhusudan. They originally presented Visibly Pushdown Automata (VPAs), a closely related formalism, then developed Nested Word Automata as they are implemented in OpenNWA, and finally better unified the two models with an expanded definition of NWAs. (Though not more powerful in terms of language acceptance, the expanded definition allows NWAs which may be more compact. However, OpenNWA uses the original definition from the DLT paper, which would later be known as a weakly-hierarchical, linearly-accepting NWA. The more restrictive formalism has benefits; in particular, many of the closure operations require "lowering" the input NWAs to the restricted form.)

Both Alur and Madhusudan maintain a bibliography of papers related to VPAs and NWAs. They have received a lot of attention over the last few years, both for applications and theoretical results.