Abstract
Partial derivatives are widely used to convert regular expressions to nondeterministic automata. For the word membership problem, it is not strictly necessary to build an automaton. In this paper, we study the size of partial derivatives on the average case. For expressions in strong star normal form, we show that on average and asymptotically the largest partial derivative is at most half the size of the expression. The results are obtained in the framework of analytic combinatorics considering generating functions of parametrised combinatorial classes defined implicitly by algebraic curves. Our average case estimates suggest that a detailed word membership algorithm based directly on partial derivatives should be analysed both theoretically and experimentally.
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Notes
This hypothesis states that for every positive \(\delta <1\), SAT cannot be solved in time \(O^*(2^{\delta n})\)—see [22].
Note that \(m(\partial ^+(s_n))\) is sequence A034856 minus 2 in OEIS (https://oeis.org/A034856).
This could be \(\Vert \gamma \Vert \). We note, however, that representing a set of PDs with the compact method of Sect. 8 results into subtree sharing, so the total size of the set is less than the sum of the sizes of its elements.
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The authors António Machiavelo, Nelma Moreira and Rogério Reis were partially supported by CMUP, which is financed by national funds through FCT—Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, I.P., under the project with reference UIDB/00144/2020. Stavros Konstantinidis was partially supported by NSERC, Canada.
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Konstantinidis, S., Machiavelo, A., Moreira, N. et al. On the size of partial derivatives and the word membership problem. Acta Informatica 58, 357–375 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00236-021-00399-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00236-021-00399-6