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An efficient incremental DFA minimization algorithm

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 June 2003

BRUCE W. WATSON  and
JAN DACIUK
BRUCE W. WATSON
Affiliation:
Department of Computer Science, University of Pretoria, Pretoria 0002, South Africa Software Construction Research Group, Technical University of Eindhoven, the Netherlands Ribbit Software Systems Inc. & FST Labs e-mail: watson@fst-labs.com
JAN DACIUK
Affiliation:
Alfa-Informatica, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, Groningen, the Netherlands Technical University of Gdansk, Poland e-mail: jandac@eti.pg.gda.pl
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Abstract

In this paper, we present a new Deterministic Finite Automata (DFA) minimization algorithm. The algorithm is incremental – it may be halted at any time, yielding a partially-minimized automaton. All of the other (known) minimization algorithms have intermediate results which are not useable for partial minimization. Since the first algorithm is easily understood but inefficient, we consider three practical and effective optimizations. The first two optimizations do not affect the asymptotic worst-case running time – though they perform well on a large class of automata. The third optimization yields an quadratic-time algorithm which is competitive with the previously known ones.

Type
Research Article
Information
Natural Language Engineering , Volume 9 , Issue 1 , March 2003 , pp. 49 - 64
Copyright
© 2003 Cambridge University Press

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