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Computing ϵ-Free NFA from Regular Expressions in O(n log2(n)) Time

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 April 2002

Christian Hagenah
Affiliation:
Institut für Informatik, Universität Stuttgart, Breitwiesenstr. 20-22, 70565 Stuttgart, Germany.
Anca Muscholl
Affiliation:
LIAFA, Université Paris VII, 2 place Jussieu, Case 7014, 75251 Paris Cedex 05, France; e-mail: [email protected] Institut für Informatik, Universität Stuttgart, Breitwiesenstr. 20-22, 70565 Stuttgart, Germany. LIAFA, Université Paris VII, 2 place Jussieu, Case 7014, 75251 Paris Cedex 05, France; e-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

The standard procedure to transform a regular expression of size n to an ϵ-free nondeterministic finite automaton yields automata with O(n) states and O(n2) transitions. For a long time this was supposed to be also the lower bound, but a result by Hromkovic et al. showed how to build an ϵ-free NFA with only O(n log2(n)) transitions. The current lower bound on the number of transitions is Ω(n log(n)). A rough running time estimation for the common follow sets (CFS) construction proposed by Hromkovič et al. yields a cubic algorithm. In this paper we present a sequential algorithm for the CFS construction which works in time O(n log(n) + size of the output). On a CREW PRAM the CFS construction can be performed in time O(log(n)) using O(n + (size of the output)/log(n)) processors. We also present a simpler proof of the lower bound on the number of transitions.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
© EDP Sciences, 2000

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