Incremental Construction of Compact Acyclic NFAs

TL;DR

This paper introduces an incremental algorithm for constructing compact acyclic NFAs, which are smaller than minimal DFAs and useful for linguistic lexicon storage, enhancing automata efficiency.

Contribution

It proposes a novel incremental method for building compact acyclic NFAs that reduces size compared to minimal DFAs, improving automata construction efficiency.

Findings

Generated NFAs are significantly smaller than minimal DFAs.

The algorithm produces automata without equivalent states.

Compact NFAs are effective for linguistic lexicon storage.

Abstract

This paper presents and analyzes an incremental algorithm for the construction of Acyclic Non-deterministic Finite-state Automata (NFA). Automata of this type are quite useful in computational linguistics, especially for storing lexicons. The proposed algorithm produces compact NFAs, i.e. NFAs that do not contain equivalent states. Unlike Deterministic Finite-state Automata (DFA), this property is not sufficient to ensure minimality, but still the resulting NFAs are considerably smaller than the minimal DFAs for the same languages.