Algorithm for the k-Position Tree Automaton Construction

The word position automaton was introduced by Glushkov and McNaughton in the early 1960. This automaton is homogeneous and has (||\E||+1) states for a word expression of alphabetic width ||\E||. This kind of automata is extended to regular tree expressions. In this paper, we give an efficient algorithm that computes the \Follow sets, which are used in different algorithms of conversion of a regular expression into tree automata. In the following, we consider the k-position tree automaton construction. We prove that for a regular expression \E of a size |\E| and alphabetic width ||\E||, the \Follow sets can be computed in O(||\E||\cdot |\E|) time complexity.