Abstract

. We present an algorithm for minimizing sequential transducers. This algorithm is shown to be efficient, since in the case of acyclic transducers it operates in O(jEj + jV j + (Ej \Gamma jV j + jF j):(jPmax j + 1) steps, where E is the set of edges of the given transducer, V the set of its vertices, F the set of final states, and Pmax the longest of the greatest common prefixes of the output paths leaving each state of the transducer. It can be applied to a larger class of transducers which includes subsequential transducers. 1 Introduction Finite automata and transducers are used in many efficient programs. They allow to produce in a very easy way lexical analyzers for complex languages. In some applications as in Natural Language Processing the involved finite-state machines can contain several hundreds of thousands of states. Reducing the size of these graphs without losing their recognition properties is then crucial. This problem has been solved in the case of deterministic autom...

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