Incremental construction of minimal acyclic finite-state automata

  • Authors:
  • Jan Daciuk;Bruce W. Watson;Stoyan Mihov;Richard E. Watson

  • Affiliations:
  • Technical University of Gdańsk;University of Pretoria;Bulgarian Academy of Sciences;-

  • Venue:
  • Computational Linguistics - Special issue on finite-state methods in NLP
  • Year:
  • 2000

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Abstract

In this paper, we describe a new method for constructing minimal, deterministic, acyclic finite-state automata from a set of strings. Traditional methods consist of two phases: the first to construct a trie, the second one to minimize it. Our approach is to construct a minimal automaton in a single phase by adding new strings one by one and minimizing the resulting automaton on-the-fly. We present a general algorithm as well as a specialization that relies upon the lexicographical ordering of the input strings. Our method is fast and significantly lowers memory requirements in comparison to other methods.