1998/04/28 by Gertjan van Noord
Computer Science · #cmp-lg #cs.CL
published as Proceedings of FSMNLP'98. International Workshop on Finite-State Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 1-12, June 29 - July 1, 1998. Bilkent University. Ankara, Turkey.
arxiv created 1998/04/28 · arxiv updated 2009/11/30
The paper discusses the problem of determinising finite-state automata containing large numbers of epsilon-moves. Experiments with finite-state approximations of natural language grammars often give rise to very large automata with a very large number of epsilon-moves. The paper identifies three subset construction algorithms which treat epsilon-moves. A number of experiments has been performed which indicate that the algorithms differ considerably in practice. Furthermore, the experiments suggest that the average number of epsilon-moves per state can be used to predict which algorithm is likely to perform best for a given input automaton.