A Fast and Simple Algorithm for Constructing Minimal Acyclic Deterministic Finite Automata

Incremental construction of minimal acyclic finite-state automata

In this paper, we describe a new method for constructing minimal, deterministic, acyclic finitestate 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 prese...

How to squeeze a lexicon

Minimal acyclic deterministic finite automata (ADFAs) can be used as a compact representation of finite string sets with fast access time. Creating them with traditional algorithms of DFA minimization is a resource hog when a large collection of strings is involved. This paper aims to popularize an efficient but little known algorithm for creating minimal ADFAs recognizing a finite language, in...

A Taxonomy of Algorithms for Constructing Minimal Acyclic Deterministic Finite Automata

Incremental Construction and Maintenance of Minimal Finite-State Automata

Daciuk et al. [Computational Linguistics 26(1):3–16 (2000)] describe a method for constructing incrementally minimal, deterministic, acyclic finite-state automata (dictionaries) from sets of strings. But acyclic finite-state automata have limitations: For instance, if one wants a linguistic application to accept all possible integer numbers or Internet addresses, the corresponding finitestate a...

Exact Generation of Acyclic Deterministic Finite Automata

We give a canonical representation for trim acyclic deterministic finite automata (ADFA) with n states over an alphabet of k symbols. Using this normal form, we present a backtracking algorithm for the exact generation of ADFAs. This algorithm is a non trivial adaptation of the algorithm for the exact generation of minimal acyclic deterministic finite automata (MADFA), presented by Almeida et al..