5

I saw this term "Glushkov NFA" at http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/2064 . Search engines are returning references to articles that use glushkov nfa, but nothing specific about the glushkov nfa itself.

What is Glushkov NFA? How different is it from the NFA created from Thompson Construction?

woodstok
  • 2,704
  • 3
  • 34
  • 50
  • This sounds like the kind of deep and technical question that finds good answers over on http://cstheory.stackexchange.com/ – glenatron Apr 26 '13 at 11:15
  • 1
    @glenatron: CSTheory is for research-level questions only. [cs.se] would be a better place. – hammar May 09 '13 at 12:34
  • 1
    Also, this article explains what is a Glushkov automaton: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030439759700296X –  Mar 17 '15 at 11:51

2 Answers2

3

I found this article "A Unified Construction of the Glushkov, Follow, and Antimirov Automata" containing a definition of the Glushkov construction of an NFA.

Mike Samuel
  • 118,113
  • 30
  • 216
  • 245
Bryan Olivier
  • 5,207
  • 2
  • 16
  • 18
  • 1
    The summary of that article suggests that the two source papers are ["V. M. Glushkov. The abstract theory of automata. Russian Mathematical Surveys, 16:1–53, 1961."](http://www.mathnet.ru/php/archive.phtml?wshow=paper&jrnid=rm&paperid=6668&option_lang=eng) and ["R. McNaughton and H. Yamada. Regular expressions and state graphs for automata. IEEE Transactions on Electronic Computers, 9(1):39–47, 1960."](http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/login.jsp?tp=&arnumber=5221603). – Mike Samuel Aug 20 '13 at 15:15
2

Flexible Pattern Matching in Strings contains a very good definition of Glushkov automata. It is the NFA constructed from a regex parse tree using the last,first, follow,nullable functions. This NFA does not contain empty transitions which is the main difference from the NFA created in Thompson Construction.

woodstok
  • 2,704
  • 3
  • 34
  • 50