A Program That Simplifies Regular Expressions (Tool paper)
Baudouin Le Charlier

TL;DR
This paper introduces a system that simplifies regular expressions by transforming them into shorter, equivalent forms using a unified data structure, improving efficiency in operations like language inclusion checks.
Contribution
It combines multiple representations of regular languages into a unified data structure and dynamically reduces representations during operations, enhancing efficiency and simplification capabilities.
Findings
System effectively simplifies regular expressions.
Unified data structure improves operation efficiency.
Experimental results demonstrate practical usefulness.
Abstract
This paper presents the main features of a system that aims to transform regular expressions into shorter equivalent expressions. The system is also capable of computing other operations useful for simplification, such as checking the inclusion of regular languages. The main novelty of this work is that it combines known but distinct ways of representing regular languages into a global unified data structure that makes the operations more efficient. In addition, representations of regular languages are dynamically reduced as operations are performed on them. Expressions are normalized and represented by a unique identifier (an integer). Expressions found to be equivalent (i.e. denoting the same regular language) are grouped into equivalence classes from which a shortest representative is chosen. The article briefly describes the main algorithms working on the global data structure. Some…
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Taxonomy
TopicsNatural Language Processing Techniques · semigroups and automata theory · Text and Document Classification Technologies
