Incremental algorithms for solving regular expression intersection non-emptiness

Haiming Chen, Hong Huang, Rongchen Li, Chengyao Peng, Weihao Su

Abstract: The intersection non-emptiness problem of regular languages is one of the most classical and fundamental decision problems in formal language theory, which plays an important role in many areas of computer science. In this paper, we propose five incremental algorithms for checking the intersection of regular expressions, which avoid explicitly constructing automata and use coordinatewise quasi-orders among states to reduce the search space. We conduct experiments and compare the algorithms with seven state-of-the-art tools. The results show advantages of the algorithms over existing methods in terms of efficiency on two real-world benchmarks.