The tree is an incredibly common data structure in computer science. Decision trees are well known. Random forests are ubiquitous in Machine Learning. Should the authors really have to dumb their paper down so people who don’t work in this domain avoid confusing it with work in arborism?
Pretty sure the guy you’re replying to was half-joking, but adding the words ‘machine learning’ in the first sentence would have cleared this up pretty simply and wouldn’t have resulted in dumbing down anything.