Abstract
We present a reflection on the evolution of the different methods for constructing minimal deterministic acyclic finite-state automata from a finite set of words. We outline the most important methods, including the traditional ones (which consist of the combination of two phases: insertion of words and minimization of the partial automaton) and the incremental algorithms (which add new words one by one and minimize the resulting automaton on-the-fly, being much faster and having significantly lower memory requirements). We analyze their main features in order to provide some improvements for incremental constructions, and a general architecture that is needed to implement large dictionaries in natural language processing (NLP) applications.
This work has been partially supported by the European Union (under FEDER project 1FD97-0047-C04-02), by the Spanish Government (under project TIC2000-0370-C02-01), and by the Galician Government (under project PGIDT99XI10502B).
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© 2002 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Graña, J., Barcala, F.M., Alonso, M.A. (2002). Compilation Methods of Minimal Acyclic Finite-State Automata for Large Dictionaries. In: Watson, B.W., Wood, D. (eds) Implementation and Application of Automata. CIAA 2001. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 2494. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-36390-4_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-36390-4_12
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